All Sparks Will Burn Out
by Magery
Summary: Once, you called the apocalypse Tuesday. Once, you quelled goddesses with a glare. Once, you chose not to be a Beast. That was ten years ago. The Grand Order is over. The last world has been saved for the last time. The pen has lifted from the page. These days you're just a girl who's seen too much. But the story everyone told you was over is calling you back one last time.
1. Entrée

You're that girl at the bar.

Half-slumped over the stool, nursing a drink spilled from the lips of a twelve-hour workday. A splash of red hair streaked white by stress and a suit dark as the nicotine you tap into the ashtray. Pretty in a Hollywood extra kind of way; cheerleader number thirteen walking in the background of the shot. You look too cool to be here, at a crummy bar in the outskirts of London where the lights sway to the rumble of the traffic and most of the bottles on the rack behind the counter are three-quarters empty. The sort of cool that manic pixie dream girls are stitched out of and sold to every awkward nerd who doesn't understand why they don't have friends.

Look, here comes one of them right now. He's been here every week this past month, making eyes at you from the unswept corner of this dinky little room. It's not as creepy as it sounds: you're just especially maudlin today. Too much whiskey and a couple of dead bodies does that to you. Even after all this time.

Sweatshirt boy makes his nervous approach, casual as a full-bore marching band, and you're already sighing as you turn to send him on his merry way when he's unceremoniously shoved to the side by someone sliding into the seat next to you. Tall, long dark hair, coat the rich red of sunset and a scowl carved into narrow cheeks that sends students running at twenty paces.

"Sensei," you say. Your surprise is a beat or two too slow. Maybe he'll blame the alcohol. You doubt it, though. Waver Velvet was always too sharp for a fool like you. "I wasn't expecting you."

"You still drink whiskey." His voice sounds the way the drink feels. It slides down your spine with a guilty shiver. A couple of smooth hand-signals and a tap on the side of your narrow glass have the bartender shuffling to pour the errant professor his own glass of Jack and save you the trouble of an immediate response. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."

"Some things don't change." It's trite, but you're not drunk enough for this.

(Hah, drunk enough. Now there's a good joke).

"That's what I'm counting on," he says, staring right at you. Most people say his eyes are hazel, but you think that's stupid. Hazel, haze—no, when Waver Velvet looks at something, he _sees_. Nothing hazy about it. "It's good to see you, Ritsuka Fujimaru."

You breathe in. The air tastes like stale beer and the bitterness of your last cigarette. "That's not my name, sensei."

The words makes you want to smile. So you do. The curl of your lips is lazy. Familiar.

Waver blinks, then blushes slightly. He wears his embarrassment with as much grace as he ever has. "Sorry, I'd forgotten."

You shrug, a brief bump of one shoulder that crinkles the collar of your jacket. "Maybe if you'd come to the wedding."

The silence stretches out like taffy. The two of you digest it for a moment before Waver swallows. "I wanted to."

The bartender staggers over with Waver's whiskey, plopping it on the stained counter with a meaty fist before limping away. For want of anything to say, you clink glasses and toss what's left of yours back in one smooth motion. It's slick down your throat and you feel your cheeks flush with warmth. You didn't always like that feeling, but it's grown on you.

"A—anyway," Waver says, "how have you been?"

He grimaces immediately after. Probably berating himself for asking something so boorish, given the circumstances. It draws a laugh out of you, only slightly stilted. "Well, thank you. Life isn't as… interesting as it used to be, but I'm happy. We're happy."

Waver goes to clasp you on your right shoulder—then suddenly stops. His hand, fine-boned and spidery, stills a few inches above your suit. It hovers, lingering like a bad memory. You tilt your head to look at him, a little curious. What's the pro—oh.

"It's fine," you say, smoothing your ponytail with your other hand before you quite notice you're doing it. "It's been ten years. You don't need to still dance around it. I'd prefer if you didn't."

He breathes out, almost relieved, and finishes clapping you on the shoulder. There's a muffled _clunk_ as his rings collide with the metal beneath the fabric and Waver winces a little. You give him a pointed glare, amber eyes fierce as firelight, and he hurriedly pats you a couple times more as if in reassurance.

This, more than anything, makes Waver Velvet the man he is: the sincere awkwardness of his kindness.

"Why are you here?" It's only after you ask that you realise the implications of the question and hurry to correct yourself. "Not that it's not good to see you, but I don't think this is a casual visit."

"You're right." His voice is low and soft. "I'm sorry, but I need to tell you something. The Director is dying."

You blink. "Barthomeloi?"

It's surprising, very much so, but you also, uh… don't really care if you're honest. Office politics have never really interested you.

"No," he says, even softer. His lips twitch like they're flinching before he speaks again. "Director Kyrielight."

Your glass shatters.

There are a few startled shouts from the other patrons in the bar and even the half-deaf bartender looks up from his pointless mopping. But they must see something in your face—or the newly-rent holes in your glove, where dark alloy gleams instead of flesh—because they promptly pretend nothing happened.

You unclench your fingers. Slowly. Deliberately.

They're trembling. You didn't think the arm was still sensitive enough to do that.

"_What_ did you just say?"

Waver brushes a constellation of glass-dust off the front of his shirt. It glints like snow beneath sunlight against the black silk. There's a sympathy in the distant cast of his jaw that you want to slap away. But that's not who you are anymore. "Mash Kyrielight is dying and we don't know why."

"Then figure it out," you snap, straight to the face of the Clocktower's foremost investigator. Like you can't see the creases below his eyes and the infinitesimal slump of his shoulders. Like you can't tell why he'd have sought you out in person to share the news.

The glance Waver gives you suggests he knows exactly what you're thinking.

You look away.

"She'd like to see you," he says. Each syllable drips across your skin like antiseptic. There's a dull drone in your ears, an electric-white buzz. When you look up, there's a shadow over Waver's face like a surgical mask.

You shake your head, an almost-violent snap of your neck from side to side like you're trying to shake your thoughts out of your ears. If Waver notices how your fingers have curled into the counter-top, cracking the wood, he's polite enough to ignore it.

"Okay." You have holidays saved up. Your boss likes you as much as she can like anyone. Same for your colleagues. You'll just—you'll just declare a family emergency. "Thank you for telling me."

"It doesn't have to be right away." Waver hesitates, running a hand through his hair. "Just… soon."

"Okay." You toss a few bills down to cover the cost of his drink and the broken glass and stand up. When you speak, your jaw feels tight. Like you're trying to work the bones through air congealed to iron. "Will—will there be anyone else there?"

"She asked for you first."

Oh.

"I have to go." You attempt a smile. It hangs off your face like a broken hinge. "It was—I'm glad it was you."

Waver nods. For a moment you think he might hug you. But in the end he aborts the half-step and folds his arms self-consciously behind his back. A scholar's parade rest. "Me too."

You walk away. The bar door swings shut behind you. It's cold out here, even bundled up as you are in a suit, jacket, and tie. You go to rub your hands together for warmth and hiss as you grind glass into your left palm. _Fuck_. The traffic rumbles past in and out of the city, headlights dappling a kaleidoscope on the pavement you cannot feel beneath your feet.

Your breath whispers out as snow.

The streets pass in blurs that you blame on too much whiskey. It's a lie because you can't get drunk but you let yourself have it. Just until you get home. You force yourself across cobblestones and pedestrian crossings and nearly get hit by a car, slowly walking faster and faster until you're almost running. You take the stairs to your apartment two at a time, heels cracking against the metal and setting the rickety bannister to trembling. Fumbling for the keycard in the inside pocket of your jacket reminds you your left hand is bleeding but _fuck_ you'll deal with it later you just—you need to be inside.

You need to be away.

The door clicks unlocked, bouncing off the plaster as you shove it open. You've probably scratched the hallway's paint. The lights are on—you don't remember doing that but it's not important. You slam the door closed and hope it locks itself. Before you, the hallway opens up to the cramped living room and you're halfway to throwing yourself onto your faded leather couch when a woman steps out of your bedroom.

She's tall. Much taller than you. Slender like a knife, with narrow cheeks and hair so long it swishes against her thick black boots. Eyes the pale blue of an empty sky, a swan-white ribbon tying her ponytail to the side, a smile that turns her face from cold to kissable—everything about her is so startlingly lovely most people pick her inhumanity at a glance.

"Ritsuka?" she asks. "Aren't you happy to se—you're crying."

Oh.

You are too.

She's _there_, suddenly, slender fingers smooth against your cheeks. Her wedding ring presses into your skin, hard and constant. You fall into the touch until the only things holding you up are her hands and the way she looks at you: eyes wide and open and almost panicked, like the idea of your tears represents some flaw in the ground state of the universe.

"What's wrong?" Your foreheads are pressed together. You don't remember pulling her closer but your hands are there on the small of her back. If she was anyone else your grip would probably be uncomfortably tight. "Please, talk to me."

"She's dying." Each word is a gasp of air. "Meltryllis, she's _dying_."

For a moment, silence. Meltryllis leads you past the television screen to the couch and you collapse into it. Into her. You curl into her soft body—she doesn't look it, she looks thin and sharp as steel, but she feels like the cool kiss of the sea. She strokes your hair, slowly untangling your ponytail. You close your eyes and try to imagine this is just an ordinary Sunday, that she's comforting you because they cancelled Father Brown.

It doesn't work.

Eventually, Meltryllis speaks, low and slow. So used to English, it takes you a couple of seconds to realise she's switched to Japanese. "Who, my love? Who's dying?"

You take a deep, stuttering breath. Your throat feels wet. "Waver came to tell me. I was out because you weren't coming home until tomorrow and he found me and he told me the Director was dying and I thought he meant Bartholmeloi but he didn't he meant—he meant—"

"—Kyrielight," she finishes. Her fingers still in your hair. You miss the motion immediately. "Oh, Ritsuka…"

"I have to go," you say. The horrible thing is that it's easier to say now that you've said it twice. Like you've somehow made it more real. "She wants to see me."

"What do _you_ want?" Meltryllis tilts her neck, that slender, swan-lake curve, to meet your eyes. Ocean against amber. She looks at you like—like it's a choice. Like you have an option to say no. To say you don't want to go. You reach up and twine your fingers in hers. They thread together like a key into a lock.

"I want to go."

"Then _we_ will go." There's a particular tilt to her jaw that tells you she won't let you say otherwise. It makes you smile, even though your lips feel dry and cracked as they curl across your cheeks. Even after all these years she can still be so silly. "I won't take no for an answer."

"I wasn't even going to ask the question. Of course I want you to come with me." You squeeze her hand. "I always want you with me."

"Hmph." She cocks her head up, haughty, like she knew that all along. Like you're a fool for telling her. But if you pulled her down to kiss her for her kindness you know you'd see her blushing. So you do.

Meltryllis moves with you easily, impossible flexibility allowing her to bend over far enough without the slightest hint of effort even though your head's in her lap. Her hair falls over you like indigo rain and her lips are soft and wet. She tastes sweet. Like flowers and falling in love.

She pulls away after a couple of seconds, cupping your jaw. You've been mocked, sometimes, for the fact that you'll never know what it's like to have her touch you properly—as if it makes her _less_ because her hands are alloy and composite rather than flesh and blood. As if it makes _you_ less because your arm is the same.

You think that if they saw you in this moment they'd realise they don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about.

"Wait a moment," she says, warm with affection. "I need to clean your palm."

It's only now that you notice you've left blood on her cheek from the scratches on your other hand. She probably doesn't care. Meltryllis has always had different priorities to most people.

Her arm distorts, water slipping from her pores to rinse your wounds clean. It washes across your skin, soothingly cold, swirling through every cut until you know there's not a single spec of glass left. For once she seems to be grateful for the way you constantly leave your used coffee cups on the stool beside the couch, because she leans over without a word, picks it up, and drains the dirty, bloody mess into it.

...you're never going to drink from that cup again. Which may have been her plan all along. How cruel.

Putting the cup back on the stool, she smooths down your fringe. "Do you want to go to bed? We can talk more tomorrow."

"Okay." You feel—better is the wrong word. But you don't feel worse and _that_, at least, is better than you were expecting. "Carry me?"

Meltryllis chuckles. "Don't act spoiled."

You'd feel more sincerely admonished if she didn't then lift you as easily as a child—one arm under your shoulder and the other under your knees—and start walking toward the bedroom you share. Her chest is warm against your side.

You sleep.

Not quickly. Not easily.

But you sleep.

* * *

**This is the transcription of a quest I am running over on the Sufficient Velocity forums. If you wish to read it in a more interactive form, I recommend checking it out there—if you don't, then reading it as a story-only work here is fine too. **

**It's been a while since I tried to write something longer than a one-shot. Let's see how it goes. **


	2. The Lord of Modern Magecraft (I)

_You watch them as they die. _

_There, Cú Chulainn, his legs bleeding to sparks like a sun cut to pieces. He's still crawling, jabbing his thornrose spear into the blasted soil as he scrapes his way toward you. He'll fizzle out before he's crossed ten metres. _

_Behind him, Scáthach, once as cold and inevitable as gravity—now you can see the dying sun through her throat, the rows of pale gravestones that litter the horizon like teeth through her intestines. Soon you won't see her at all. _

_At your feet, Serenity is choking, gasping, splattering the ground with her own sizzling blood; the earthy beauty of her skin is peeling from the bone, falling with wet splats to the ground like rain. Her skeleton will rot to black dust in a couple of minutes and scatter in the lazy breeze. It smells a little like honey. _

_There's nothing special about their deaths. They're just the closest to the end. _

_You lift your right hand, studying your fingers, rolling them over to stare at the back of your hand. You still have that tan from Camelot, from Babylon, where the sun beat you bronze and dried out your scars until they cracked your skin every second day. Red wings flutter through the hole in your glove, their edges starting to char from flame to something closer to the space between the stars where light goes to die. _

_You look up. _

_There she is. _

_"Shielder," you say. The word whispers out like the air from a corpse. _

_"Senpai," she returns, even as the edge of her sword. She's taller than you, these days. How amusing. Her hair, that moonspun mess, slips well past her shoulders and she lifts her crucifix-shield—hammered from steel dark as a sky bruised with thunder—easily on an arm flexed thick with strength. _

_You can tell she's struggling just to stand_.

_"It's funny, isn't it." You cock your head to the side, as curious as a newborn chick. "The whole world's falling asleep and it feels like I'm just waking up." _

_You tilt your head back, baring your throat. The sky is red like the blood trickling down her cheek, tinged with the flame of fourteen golden stars. Ah. It's time. You reach up, fingers curled like they're digging into the flesh of the world, and_ pull.

_There's a sound like a sword wrenched from a stone._

_You—_

—yelp as Meltryllis rolls over and digs an elbow into your collarbone, startling you awake.

Your arm is wrapped tightly around her waist, the slender curve of her back curled into your chest. Your breath, fast as the beat of your heart, puffs a few trailing strands of her lavender hair off your lips. Your shoulder aches like somebody took an axe to it. So does your chest.

You ignore it with the ease of long practice.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Lose yourself in the soft cotton clouds of your sheets. Feel her skin on your skin, the inviting sink of your fingers into the supple stretch of her waist. Hear the lazy swirl of the three-pronged fan above your bed slipping warm air across your face. Watch the digital haze of seconds sliding into minutes across the dark screen of your clock.

It's six seventeen in the morning and everything will be okay.

Your breath evens out. Your heart no longer slaps on the inside of your ribs.

Your shoulder still hurts, but that's fine.

Meltryllis shifts, the plastic caps of her thighs brushing against your bare knees. She gets restless when she's about to wake up. You press a kiss into the crown of her head and carefully pull yourself out of bed, an old football jersey from that year she decided to try the sport falling just past your hips. Her hands are in their dock next to her day-to-day legs, in the corner between the wardrobe and the wall—you unplug them and carry them over to her bedside table. It's interesting finding room to put them without knocking over any of the dolls she has posed across it, but you've been navigating this ritual one way or another for close to a decade now.

Another glance tells you she's not _quite _awake yet—she'd never let herself snuggle into your fluffy pillows like that if she knew you were watching—so you pad out of your bedroom and toward the kitchen. The floorboards, an earthy burnished oak, are cold against your feet.

You pass through the living room, past the couch and the fuzzy rug it sits on, and enter the kitchen—here linoleum replaces wood and far more importantly the possibility of tea replaces the emptiness of a morning without tea. It's small, but the warm flush of the lights as you click your fingers and they snap on, and the stack of recipe books perched precariously on top of the sparkling toaster, turn it from cramped to cozy.

You step to the closest counter—it's a little higher than you'd like, but you didn't get it renovated for _you_—and fill the powder-blue electric kettle from the tap. Sinful, you know, but when you look out the tiny window the sun is barely up and it's too early to care. The kettle starts to boil automatically when you pop the lid back on, so you turn your attention to the (overfull) pantry.

Tea, tea, tea… you trace your fingers across the boxes of tea-leaves, trying to decide if you want English Breakfast or green or oolong. Meltryllis, of course, will refuse anything but coffee, but that's what you have an espresso machine for. Which you should probably handle first. It's a bit difficult to get the coffee packet open with one arm, but your teeth are well-trained and eventually you rip it open, dump it into the machine, fill it up with water from the tap, and flick the switch.

Returning your attention to the tea, you pause as your eyes settle on a small, unopened box shoved into the back corner of the tea section, almost invisible in the gloom of the pantry's depths. For a long moment, you do not move, frozen to reminiscence. _Good morning, se_—you reach in and pull it out. Hojicha. A quick dash of it into the teapot's strainer has it ready to go just in time for the kettle to stop boiling, and you open the cupboard beneath the counter to pull out first a cup and then Meltryllis' penguin-patterned mug, one at a time.

Soon enough you are carrying your tea and her coffee back to your bedroom, both held in one hand through the ease of long practice and six months of waitressing at a cafe when you were fifteen. The bitter, nutty coffee wafts across your nose, kicking you further awake.

You walk through the door to find Meltryllis sitting up, resting against the headboard and watching you with sleepy affection. She looks almost ethereal in the sunlight drifting in through the slatted blind, her hair loose and falling across her body like mist. "Did you sleep well?"

You place both cups down on your bedside table, between a worn copy of _A Tale For The Time Being _and the black chunk of your digital clock. "Just woke up ten minutes ago."

You clamber over the bed sheets to kiss her good morning, short and sweet, and then reach past her to grab her hands. They're startlingly lovely: delicate fingers, well-cut nails, a filigree of faux-veins tracing beneath pale skin that perfectly matches her own. Some of Touko Aozaki's finest work.

(You're still not sure why she agreed to meet you: a one-armed teenaged girl without a penny to her name and thousand-yard eyes doesn't cut a particularly encouraging figure, even—perhaps especially—when she's accompanied by the most dangerous killing machine on the planet this side of the Burial Agency. But she'd muttered something about how she should've known and then let you in).

Meltryllis extends her arms, the stumps of her wrists covered in thin enchanted film to protect them during the night. You peel it carefully off each one and put it aside for cleaning. Leaning over, you kiss just above the amputation and slot her hands on: first the right, then the left. It's a silly little ritual, but it's yours.

She flexes her fingers, curling them into half a fist and then spreading them wide like starfish. Satisfied, she presses her lips to your forehead, rolls over to collect her coffee, and stops dead at the sight of the mug.

Slowly, very slowly, she turns to stare at you. Her mouth is flat, her eyes ocean-dark. "Really, Ritsuka?"

"What?" You sound as innocent as a cat still licking the cream from its whiskers.

"The mug." Suddenly you're nose to nose. She smells like freshly-pressed flowers and a crisp sea-breeze. "_That _mug."

"What's wrong with it? It's just a _pengu_—"

A thin finger settles on your lips, shoving your words back down your throat and then you back down onto the bed. By the standards of Servants, Meltryllis is not very strong. The important qualifier in that sentence is _Servants_. The sheets slip from her body as she leans over you, pressing you further into the mattress until it feels like you're almost drowning in the soft foam.

She's staring at you like—well, like the way someone might stare at a woman blushing beneath them, heart a few seconds too fast and eyes settled a few inches too low.

"I can see," she says, quiet as kissing, "that I have not properly demonstrated my… _displeasure_ at your sense of humour, my love."

"Oh?" you say, trying for arch and challenging but falling somewhere between breathy and bratty. "And what are you going to d—"

The rest of your sentence cuts off with an embarrassing squeak as her other hand flits under the hem of your shirt, settling low on your waist. The cool pressure of her skin is a delicious contrast to the warmth of your bedroom. She leans in, closer and closer, fingers falling from your lips to splay across your collarbone, and your eyes flutter shut.

"Ab-so-lute-ly," she whispers against your lips, "_nothing_."

It takes you about five seconds to realise she's not touching you any more, and another five to remember how your body works so you can shove yourself up off the sheets with one arm and glare at her.

Meltryllis smirks at you from behind her mug, smug as can be. The technicolour penguin emblazoned onto the faux-china mocks you from the safety of her hands.

"_Meeeeeeeeelt,_" you whine, pouting. "That was mean."

"Your tea will get cold," she says, still smiling. "You wouldn't want that, would you?"

Well, _no_, but that's not the point!

"I don't like you anymore," you say, folding your arm in a huff.

"That's okay. I still have coffee."

If you were an anime protagonist, this is probably about where you would say _mouuuuu_. But you aren't, so instead you decide to retreat with grace and dignity by unfolding your arm and reaching over to pick up your tea. Hooking a couple of fingers through the ceramic handle, you lift it up and carefully bring it close to your face to inhale the rich, nearly bitter scent. Ah. That's nice.

Almost absent-mindedly, Meltryllis drags your pillow up so it's flat against the headboard. You're already shuffling across the bed to snuggle yourself into her side. The flat of your shoulder, long since sheared straight to the bone, rests against her arm. Your hair falls across her bare skin like a sunrise filtering through clouds.

Meltryllis takes a long sip of her coffee before resting the mug in her lap. When she speaks, her voice is gentle. "You seem more… composed, this morning."

Your eyes flick down to your tea for a second before you look up again. From here, you can see out the doorway and into the living room. The couch you broke down on last night looms in the centre.

"Yeah," you say with a heavy sigh. "I guess I just—I don't know. It wasn't supposed to be like this."

You and Mash were meant to be inseparable. Eternal. But you haven't seen her in a decade and the only reason that's going to change is because she's dying.

Funny how these things work out.

Meltryllis drops a hand to your thigh and squeezes. "Will you hate me if I say a part of me is glad?"

"...what?" You stamp down on any momentary rage, choking it in your throat. She means something different to what you heard. You know she does.

"I'm glad you're finally going to see Kyrielight," she clarifies. "I'm not glad this is why, but—it's been long enough."

"You never said anything," you say.

She shrugs, bumping her shoulder against yours. "When did we have the time?"

You snort. "Good point."

"I only have good points," she says, cocking her jaw haughtily. "Don't act so surprised."

You sip your tea to hide your smile.

The two of you sit there for a while, nursing your drinks. The quiet is easy. Comfortable. Like a well-worn shirt warm from drying in the sun.

It's six forty-two in the morning and everything is okay.

Eventually, you speak. Your voice is drowsy, your head tucked snugly on the pillow of her collar. Meltryllis is so slender you'd imagine it'd be like lying on a knife, but she's as soft as sea foam. "I think I need to go and see Reines."

"To arrange the journey to Chaldea?" Meltryllis frowns. "I suppose you'll want me to speak to Luviagelita, then."

Honestly you hadn't actually thought that far ahead. Sometimes you forget that while your wife looks like a particularly lovely ballerina, she is also an ocean-sized artificial intelligence stitched together from three different goddesses and the woman Nyarlothotep chose as his mortal shell.

"Only if you promise you'll stop calling her Finnish," you say instead.

"Killjoy," she replies, booping you on the nose with a finger. You scrunch your face up in mock irritation. "Fine, I promise."

You press a kiss to the side of her jaw. "Thank you."

Time passes.

"We should get moving," Meltryllis says. You've finished your tea, she's finished her coffee, and the clock is telling you it's almost seven. "If I must deal with Luviagelita I would prefer to do it before she's woken up properly."

Your laughter is light and free, like petals in the wind. Instead of replying, you slide out of bed, feet sinking into the lush brown carpet. A couple of steps take you to the dock your arm rests in; several more take you around the other side of the mattress so you can kneel before Meltryllis, offering it to her like a knight before her queen.

She takes it, the dark, segmented alloy a startling contrast to the fey shimmer of her skin, and waits for you to shuck your shirt before reaching over to peel the cover off the stump of your shoulder. Like you not an hour earlier, she places it to the side for cleaning and leans in close to gently connect your arm to your body.

Your circuits, shallow and inferior as they are to any true magi's, light up all the same: you know it as ice crystallising on the inside of your veins. The old, dark cold at the end of entropy. You shiver, uncomfortable. But Meltryllis kisses you on the seamless join between flesh and metal, winding her fingers with yours, and the feeling dies like it always does.

You step away, hands slipping from hers like you're trying to pull them from honey, and collect her legs from _their_ docks. Once, they were bladed, spiked, harsh steel fangs dug into the surface of the earth every time she took a step. Now they are long and thin, gentle curves tapering out to feet swept like waves across the ocean. As you move, Meltryllis unravels the sheets from her body and twists so the caps of her thighs are jutting out over the edge of the bed.

The view is a little distracting, given how she likes to sleep, but you are no longer sixteen so there's not even a tremble in your fingers as you slot each leg onto her body. You asked, years ago, how it felt for her: whether the first few minutes after attachment were haunted by deja-vu, a low, sharp feeling in her gut that she'd been there before every time she saw herself move.

That's how you learned she'd never known anything else, why she often looked confused when people complimented her on the sculpted elegance of her prosthetics—to Meltryllis they're just her legs. They've always been her legs. Hooking them on is like getting dressed. Nothing worth noting.

But it is to you.

Meltryllis was born with knives where you had femurs. But these days she's an artist, a dancer, forever chasing that trembling moment where the song sounds wrong unless you move to it.

You think that's a lot more than nothing.

(As for you, well—you're just what's left of the end of the world. And that's enough).

You press kisses to the smooth stretch of her thighs, one just above each join between skin and steel, and straighten up. "There, done."

"Thank you," Meltryllis says, smiling. She slides to her newfound feet like a flower stretching toward the dawn, turning around to fix the pillows and rearrange the sheets to some semblance of neatness. You're content to watch her: the subtle play of muscle across her back, the slow sway of sunlight filtering through her gossamer hair.

"I love you," you say.

There's no particular reason to. No great, burning reason to scream your heart to the empyrean sky. She's just making the bed. Tomorrow it'll be your turn. Picket-fence domesticism, one century on.

But the day you need a reason to tell her is the day you don't love her at all.

When Meltryllis kisses you, she's smiling.

(In the end, there was no point making the bed).

* * *

"You can't just _do _that, Reines!"

Ah.

You probably should have expected this.

When you round the corner into the office of Lord Reines El-Melloi Archisorte, your erstwhile patron and the single smuggest person you know, the first thing you see is not the disgustingly expensive mahogany panelling, the stained-glass window framed by twin, towering bookcases, or the sumptuous sunset rug.

No—it's a short woman wearing a hood the colour of the sky after rain, standing in front of Reines' imposing ebony desk and shoving a dainty finger in her face.

Reines blinks. Her eyes bring to mind a spring in the middle of some great forest, pristine and faintly luminescent as the sun filters through the canopy, fresh with the innocence of the first few days of summer. It matches her expression perfectly.

She really is an astonishing actress.

"I don't understand the problem," she says. As always, her voice sounds like the moment in an argument just before you win it, when a smile stretches across your face and you relish the words to come. Reines leans forward, resting the voluminous, velvety sleeves of her deep blue dress on her desk. "A boy as incompetent as that has no business learning magecraft under my brother."

Gray's finger curls back into her hand to become part of her fist. She spins away to stare at the wall rather than Reines, long black coat flaring out past her hips. Both her hands are clenched and shaking with anger. "You had a teenager_ kicked out of the Clocktower because he hit on me!_"

Reines cocks her head to the side, the elegant sweep of her hair falling delicately against her neck like well-poured champagne. "Well, yes, that was unacceptable. But his papers were still forged, his family was still financially unstable, and his grades… well, best not to speak of them lest they come back to haunt some other unfortunate student. Tutoring him must have been an awful chore."

Gray breathes out, low, heavy, the same way Arturia used to in those first few beats before the spar began. She straightens to her full height, such as it is, the same way someone else might draw a sword—a slow, careful promise—and stomps back to Reine's desk to slam her hands down it. The wood dents.

"I would sooner believe that you would send Trimmau to shop at Aldi than I would believe you were not aware of the forgeries, his family, and his entire academic history two weeks before Jean even applied to study Modern Magecraft, Lord El-Melloi," Gray says, slow and fierce, each syllable the careful enunciation of royalty. "You said nothing then. Don't pretend you had any reason to say anything now except your selfish pride."

Reines raises a slender eyebrow. For someone who's face to face with an angry woman best-known for pulling out a _literal pillar of Creation_ as a party trick to stab people with, she looks at most intrigued. "For the sake of argument, dear heart, let us suppose you are right. Shouldn't you take it as a compliment?"

Oh dear.

You knock beside the door, three loud raps with your gloved hand. It clunks heavily into the wood but you don't feel a thing. Best to interrupt this before Reines runs into an acute case of flirting while Reines.

It is, of course, ridiculous to suppose she didn't know you were there all along, but in the Clocktower appearances are everything.

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything…" you begin innocently.

"R-Ritsuka!" Gray physically jumps in place before twirling to face you so quickly the floor screeches beneath her shoes and she almost overbalances on her nose. The motion is so violent, in fact, that it throws back her hood to reveal her namesake—her hair—and, well… King Arthur's face on another woman's body.

(Another woman who isn't also King Arthur. Or the other King Arthur. Or Emperor Nero. Or Okita Souji. Or—look, you get the point).

"Ah, Ritsuka," Reines says. She steeples her narrow fingers beneath her chin and studies you with a smile. Framed by her high-backed, velvet-cushioned chair, she wouldn't look out of place gloating over the strapped-down body of James Bond."I was expecting you."

"Really?" you ask. You have learned, over the years, that the best way to deal with Reines is to make sure she's enjoying herself too much to want the game to stop. "I wasn't."

Reines' smile grows.

"You need to get to Chaldea," she continues. "Who else would you come to but me?"

"I thought about calling Da Vinci, actually." Almost did it, in fact. But in the end you—well, you couldn't.

Reines presses a hand to her heart, white-gloved fingers spread wide like a spider's. She looks frankly shocked. "How cruel you are! To imagine that you thought of spurning your magnanimous benefactor for the charms of another woman."

Gray finally manages to collect herself enough to scowl. "You are _such _a hypocrite."

That is, of course, when Trimmau—Reines' mechanical maid, a living golem poured out of mercury into the shape of a woman that occasionally forgets it's not a T-1000—walks in the door, carrying an impressively well-balanced stack of papers.

"Ah, Trimmau," Reines says, as if pleasantly surprised the way nobody in the room believes her to be. "Good, you're here. Come, Ritsuka, sit down. We have much to discuss."

"Oh?" you ask, moving to one of the leather-upholstered couches off to the side of Reines' desk. Gray trails after you, though she elects to lean up against the side of it instead and lift her hood back up to cover her hair-bun. It's almost nostalgic how she's standing just out of your sight, a soft and sombre shadow in the corner of your eye. "What might that be?"

It turns out that Reines is right. Trimmau hands you paper after paper, freshly-pressed and in some cases still wet with the heady scent of ink. They're details on Chaldea: who's there, what they're doing, why they're doing it, some more detailed than others and none absurdly in-depth. But reading it is still like sinking into a past where you knew every name, every sister's birthday, and how Dr. Douglas' eyes would crease when he was just about to bluff. Some you pass to Gray absent-mindedly; she makes a small noise of surprise but you know she'd want to see how Vincent and Kartik were getting on.

Almost an hour passes before you find a moment to take a deep, stuttering breath, wipe a hand over your eyes, and ask Reines what the _point _of all of this is. You're going there for—not a _funeral_, just a, a conversation. Yeah. A conversation. You don't need to know any of this.

(You don't need to care again. It hurt enough the first time).

Reines looks at you the way she does when she's forgotten not everyone has a mind like a corkscrew bent through four dimensions. Even Trimmau pauses from where she's carefully restoring the dents Gray left in the desk, long, silver fingers a stark contrast against the dark finish. "The murder, obviously. Why else would you be going?"

"She's going to visit Mash," Gray says. "Her friend. Who is dying. She doesn't need your speculation making it worse, Reines."

"I am acting to protect my interests, Gray." Given the conversation you interrupted, a part of you suspects you aren't the only one hearing double meanings dripping from that sentence. "Someone, or something, is killing the Director of Chaldea. Only a fool would believe someone like that is just _dying _because they're _sick _or something similarly plebeian."

Reines lifts one of her palms and starts counting off with her fingers, one by one, sentence by sentence. "No: Mash Kyrielight is being murdered. She is being murdered slowly, deliberately, and _publicly_. She is being murdered as a message."

Her hand twists, fingers folding away so she can stab forward and point directly at you with her index.

"She is being murdered as an _invitation_."


	3. The Lord of Modern Magecraft (II)

You sigh.

Deep and slow and so very, very tired.

"The _whydunnit_," you say, stretching the word out to its component syllables, each taut like string pulled half an inch from breaking. "Of course. I should have known."

You stand up, walking over to Reines' desk and leaning over it the same way Gray had only an hour earlier, fingers flat on the wood. It shivers under your left hand, whatever traps Reines has left in wait for uninvited guests cackling in cruel anticipation.

The fact you notice at all is a reminder of the legacy you carry, a gift from ten thousand years of human history stacked on a child's back until the weight was all you knew. This is how magic feels to you, she who cancelled the apocalypse: like the desperate serenity of the moment between the cut and the wound. Like the atavistic reverb of your heart, blood chasing blood through the faultline cracks of your veins; like the witching-hour prickle of needles under your skin, sharp as a cymbal-beat.

Something wicked this way comes.

(But you're already here).

These days, of course, you're just a mild-mannered counselor. A therapist. The only sane woman in a castle full of magi. Someone who's seen enough to know when it gets better and when there's no point in pretending. For goodness' sake, the last time you got properly angry it was because somebody sideswiped your motorbike while it was parked on the side of the road. A far cry from bugs on a board.

But Reines is right. You think you knew she was right from the moment Waver told you and you shattered a glass because the violence felt good. Gentle, kind Mash Kyrielight, with a heart as big as the world and a shield broad enough to protect it. There's only one reason to kill her by inches, to draw out her death so she sees it coming and marvels at the deja-vu: because it would take nothing less than this to draw you back to Chaldea.

And that?

Well.

Reines returns your gaze, unflinching. There's no innocence in those pale blue eyes now. Just the long, distant emptiness of the sky, lord of all who survey it.

"What is your plan, Reines?" you ask, soft as fingers caressing a throat. "You were expecting me. What are you expecting me to _do?_"

Have you ever seen an army stand against a charge, rows of spearman overlapping until all they seem is a forest of glittering steel? Reines' smile looks like that. Bright and set to killing. "If you can fight, fight."

You nod slowly. In the background, Trimmau straightens from where she's been dusting the eclectic sculptures that dominate one corner of the room; Gray slips around the couch to join you, silent as a swooping hawk. Reaching into a pocket, you pull out a cigarette and light it with a snap of your fingers and a spark of flame from your soul. It's a small, pitiful thing, but it's enough.

You take a long, bitter breath and blow the smoke up at the ceiling. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but you're not in the mood for it. "I thought I was free, you know? That the worst thing I'd have to worry about was pretending I gave a shit about football. It was over. I was done. _We _were done. And now…"

Gray rests a hand on your forearm and you smile at her, quick and fleeting.

"Well, someone wants Ritsuka Fujimaru," you say. The word feels funny in your mouth. You haven't been a Fujimaru in years. "I hope Ritsuka Coralli will suffice."

You wonder if they understand what that means.

(You wonder if you do).

Gray squeezes your arm once before she lets go. You think you hear your bones creak.

* * *

In the end, Reines' plan is simple.

The Department of Modern Magecraft has a vested interest in Chaldea, separate from any more personal connections: it is well within her rights to send someone to represent her stake in Chaldea's time of turmoil. (Her words. Not yours). Waver Velvet has been and gone, but only as an investigator; Reines will send you as a _message_. A statement that Lord El-Melloi is aware of the game and distinctly unamused.

You are, she says, to be her red right hand.

(She's always had a flair for the dramatic).

Naturally, you protest. You are no fixer, no pocket Enforcer. You spend most of your days _talking _to those people, teasing out their traumas under an array of geas so tight you can't even remember what you've heard unless you're face-to-face with the one who told you. You don't really mind. It's good to be someone who listens. Someone who understands. Someone who cares.

You think everyone needs someone like that.

"Ritsuka," Reines says, "stop being an idiot."

She's standing, now, her mahogany throne thrust back and her fingers flat on her desk. Even like this, leaning over it to stare you in the eye, she still has to look down to see you. It's ridiculous. You've seen photos of Waver Velvet at nineteen. You've seen photos of Waver Velvet at twenty. And you wouldn't have believed it for a second if the same thing hadn't happened to Reines right in front of you.

Once, she barely came up to your shoulder, arrogantly thin, all aristocratic delicacy bred by centuries of being very careful not to marry _too _many cousins. Now—well, if Gray reminds you of King Arthur, so does Reines. Just… not the same King Arthur.

Ironic, really, given Gray's the one who holds Rhongomyniad.

"You play at being the mild-mannered saint, the friendly face in the aftermath who's left her own war behind and just wants to _help_," she continues, each word chosen with the careful care of a butcher selecting knives. "And maybe you're not playing at all. Maybe that's genuinely who you are. Who you were always meant to be. I suppose it's admirable. Inspiring, even."

Gray opens her mouth—and shuts it when Reines shushes her with a fierce swipe of the wrist, never taking her gaze off you. Her mouth is a short, flat line.

"But if I wanted a thug, if I wanted some brainless brute to swing at my enemies like an overpriced club, I would ask Luvia for her recommendations. And if I wanted _kindness_, I would fly to Hollywood and hire an actress, because if I'm selling lies I should at least ensure they're professional. I want neither of these things."

She reaches out, fingers folding around your chin and tilting up your jaw, nails expensive pinpricks in your skin. You could move away. But you don't.

"I want you. Not just because _you_ want to go. Not just because you know Chaldea better than anyone else I could send. Because I remember the girl who walked away. And I think you do too."

You still dream about her, sometimes. Gravestones and grave-suns and the aching lethargy of waking from sleep so deep it could be death. Your stomach knots like a snake chasing its own tail.

"Live as who you are, Ritsuka. But remember who you _were_. I guarantee you whoever our enemy is, they have not forgotten."

Reines lets you go, straightening to stand at her full height. It's a familiar mannerism. Waver uses it whenever he's about to present a deduction.

This, of course, is exactly when Gray interrupts her. "There's an easier solution, Reines, than browbeating one of your only friends into doing what you want her to do."

"Oh?" Reines says, tilting her head to the side.

"I'll go with her."

"You'll go with her." Reines' expression doesn't flicker. But Trimmau drops the book she'd taken out to dust around. It lands with a dull thump.

"I'll go with her," Gray repeats, a little firmer. "Unless there's someone else in this room—apart from you—with more experience of the day-to-day politicking a representative of the El-Melloi would have to deal with?"

She looks around, jade-cut eyes exaggeratedly wide. Something giggles from inside her collar. Add's having fun.

"There isn't," Reines says slowly. A tactician's careful retreat.

"Then I guess this is the best way to protect your interests, isn't it?"

_Ouch_.

"I just remembered Meltryllis wanted to meet me for a late brunch," you say, clapping Gray on the back. Slight as she is, it still feels like high-fiving a brick wall. "Let me know how it goes."

You don't think the transparency of your excuse will matter. This conversation is clearly no longer about you.

A nod to Reines, a wave to Trimmau, and you're walking out the door.

Time to be anywhere but here.

* * *

The strangest thing about Rin Tohsaka is that her feet touch the ground.

It takes you back, seeing her next to Meltryllis, the two of them strolling through the Clocktower's stone hallways as she complains in a loud voice about something Luvia did. But Rin's the wrong height, just past your wife's elbow instead of floating at eye level, her shirt bright red instead of not being a shirt at all.

Meltryllis sees you first, looking over her shoulder. She smiles, soft and lovely, and you hurry a little to meet her, feet loud on the dark cobbles. Rin looks up, broken out of her rant by the fact her companion has stopped walking. If she turns around, you don't notice: Meltryllis has your hands and then your lips.

"Hey," you say. She's cool to the touch. But that's not why you feel her kiss all the way down your spine, low and deep.

"Hello." She pulls away, slow, lingering, and laces your fingers together properly. You want to tug her back by the soft curl of her sky-stained scarf. "How was the meeting?"

A sigh from beside the both of you. "I see I was expecting sympathy from the wrong quarter. I should have known."

You blink and turn to face Rin, who's standing there with a hand on her hip, the other fiddling with her pendant. The ruby hangs in the hollow of her throat, a startlingly sanguine splash against her ice-pale skin. "Hmm?"

Meltryllis laughs. "She was telling me about how Luviagelita ignores her for Emiya every time the three of them are in the same room."

"It's _infuriating_," Rin grouses—as expected, she's quick to replace her annoyance at you with her annoyance at Luvia. "Can't she stop monopolising Shirou? He's my boyfriend, not hers!"

"Rin," you say, "have you considered telling her that?"

"Telling her what? That I want her to leave Shirou alone? I tell her that twice a day!"

"No, telling her that you want her to stop leaving _you _alone."

For a moment, silence. Then incandescence. You didn't think human skin could get that colour, but now you've lost the ruby in the flush that spreads all the way down to her neck. "I—that is—first of all—_excuse me?_"

"Rin," you say, resting a hand on her shoulder, "it's okay to like boys _and _girls. You don't need to pretend for anyone."

Rin glares at you. "I know _that_, Ritsuka! Ayako wasn't _Shirou's _ide—"

She trails off very, very quickly.

There might be a 'meep' involved.

"Oh?" You sidle closer to her, smile wide and delighted. The syllables drip off your tongue like sweet honey. "What's this about an Ay~a~ko~?"

"Nothing! Nothing at all!" Rin spins in a huff of folded arms and flyaway hair, jaw thrust challenging toward the cavernous roof. Framed by the rich sunlight filtering through the windows, she is the very picture of affronted dignity. You can see why Luvia enjoys this so much. "Forget I said anything."

"Oh, of course," you say. "I guess I'll just ask Shirou instead."

There are hands on your biceps and a face in your face—a very pretty face, with a sleek jawline and delicate eyelashes. The fact it's currently scrunched up in a fierce scowl, lips set hard and firm, only serves to make it prettier. Not as pretty as Meltryllis, of course. But still, you… look, you have certain weaknesses, okay? And there's _nothing wrong with that_.

(Behind you, you can hear Meltryllis laughing, rich and melodic).

"You won't," Rin says very slowly, her cheeks speckled with red. "You won't ask him about Ayako. You won't ask him about Luvia. And you won't ask _Luvia _about Luvia either. I don't need a matchmaker, Ritsuka."

She lets you go and steps back, boots clicking on the stone.

"Okay, okay." You drop your hand to your side and Meltryllis captures it again almost immediately. "Just—don't have regrets, Rin. Life isn't what we leave behind."

Meltryllis squeezes your fingers. Your glove squeaks beneath her grip.

"No," Rin says. She isn't blushing now. You're not even sure if she's actually looking at you. Whatever's behind those ocean eyes is too distant for you to know. "Sometimes it's only the things we leave behind."

"How profound," Meltryllis says, draping her other arm around your neck and resting her chin on your collarbone, long sleeve falling across your chest. Her hair tickles your cheek and smells like lavender. You bump her with your hip, the fabric of your trousers sliding against her bare thigh, and she pauses. "Sorry. I didn't mean that how it sounded."

Rin shrugs, easy, casual. "It's fine."

She smooths down her skirt and straightens, eyeing her watch. It's sleek and chic and delicate, which suggests Rin had nothing to do with buying it. There's not a diamond in sight.

"Look, Ritsuka," she says, "we don't see each other all that much. Once or twice a month, mostly in passing. You see Shirou more often because he darn well needs it. But I've touched the Kaleidoscope. Not all the lives I've lived are mine. And I—well, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can tell. I know what you're doing. If you're helping me, you don't have to worry about helping yourself."

She shakes her head, dark hair smooth and sweeping through the air. "I don't want to know what's wrong. Or, rather, you don't have to tell me. But just… I hope it goes well, yeah? I hope it all works out in the end. I thought I should tell you that."

You smile. It blooms on your face like a lazy sunrise. "Thanks, Rin."

She waves a hand through the air dismissively. "It's what she would have wanted me to say. Don't get a big head."

"Too late for that," Meltryllis says, a whisper of breath across your throat. Your skin prickles and your heart accelerates, just a little. Honestly. Her voice has no respect for a young maiden's delicate sensibilities. "These days Ritsuka's positively insufferable."

"I _wonder_ where she learned that from," Rin says, each syllable a slow, languid stretch. You'd think it rude if not for the sparkle in her eyes, like sunlight across the surface of the sea.

You can't see Meltryllis smile—but you can feel it, her jaw brushing against yours as her lips curl up. "Gilgamesh, obviously."

Rin raises a finger.

Then she lowers it.

"I can't even argue with that," she says.

You're not sure who starts laughing first.

* * *

"So." Meltryllis settles her mug on the floral-print tablecloth and reaches over to take another bite of her carrot cake. A couple of crumbs linger adorably on her lips. "You never did get to tell me how the meeting went."

You blow out a breath, looking out of the café and across the Thames. The skyline is half stone and half steel, towering skyscrapers armoured in glass stabbed like spears into the sky, their shadows darkening brick-and-mortar rooftops built before England ever knew democracy. A bird cartwheels overhead, squawking angrily at some unknown slight.

"I think Reines and Gray were about to have an argument when I left," you say. "They were having an argument when I got there, too, which is probably what made Gray pick the second one."

"Was it Reines' fault?" Meltryllis asks, cupping her cheeks in her palms and resting her elbows on the table. She seems content to watch you and nothing else, face soft.

You snort. "I'm not paying out on that bet. I love her but she's such an idiot sometimes."

"She'll learn. Nobody's first relationship is perfect."

"Speak for yourself," you say, folding your arms in a mock huff. "I'll have you know that I have never done anything romantically wrong ever."

"Are you _sure_ about that, Ritsuka?" Meltryllis smiles. Oh no. You know that smile. "Because I remember EMIYA, a crush more obnoxiously obvious than the Hollywood sign, and a girl so oblivious she had to catch him _in flagrante delicto _with the Hound of Culann before she realised he didn't want to be _that _sort of daddy for her."

"_We agreed to never speak of that again_," you snap, blushing fiercely.

Meltryllis tries desperately to smother her giggles with a sip of her coffee and barely manages to stop herself from sopping it all over the edge of her cup.

"I'm going to get you for that." You reach over the table and poke her on the shoulder. "Just you wait."

"I look forward to it."

The next few minutes pass in silence as you delicately reassemble your dignity out of careful bites of your cookie. A breeze rustles the newspapers the table of older men to your right are reading, carrying with it salt and brine and the smell of wet wood from the nearby dock. It threatens to steal your lovely white sunhat right off your head.

"Reines says it's a murder," you say eventually. "A slow, drawn-out, agonising murder to get my attention because somebody wants me in Chaldea. Because they know I wouldn't go back unless it was an emergency."

Meltryllis closes her eyes. Her voice is soft. "I was afraid of that."

"Yeah."

A pause.

"It's… why now? Why this?" You bury your face in your hands with a long, jagged sigh. "Maybe we should just run away. Tell the whole world to fuck off and take another honeymoon. You could kiss me beneath Victoria Falls and nothing else would matter."

Meltryllis leans forward, peeling your fingers from your cheeks and tangling them with hers. She looks at you with a gentleness that's almost aching. Like the moment right before you fall asleep, when your eyes are too heavy to move and your legs are sluggish as logs and all that remains of the world is the weight of her arm slung low and possessive across your hips. The sort of look they try to write songs about.

"We could. If you wanted to."

She knows you so well it hurts, sometimes. An ache like the low burn of your thighs after an hour spent running. It reminds you that this is real.

"Some days I wonder what life would be like if I did. If I knew how to let things go." You kiss the backs of her palms, lips soft against her skin. "I imagine I would hate it."

"You would," she says. "It'd drive you mad."

You laugh, low and wry. "We're all mad here."

Meltryllis sniffs, cocking her jaw. "Speak for yourself."

You can't help but smile.

"I think Gray will be coming with us," you say. "She seemed rather... determined when I left. And it'll be good to have someone who can handle whatever politicking Reines wants."

Meltryllis tilts her head to the side, birdlike. A wisp of lavender hair escapes from her fringe and ripples in the breeze. "Why do we care about the politicking?"

Oh, right. You forgot to explain.

So you do. You tell Meltryllis what happened, what Reines said, what she wants you to do. Then Meltryllis tells _you _how her meeting with Luvia went, sounding exceptionally proud of the fact they only got into _three _arguments in thirty minutes. You give that the round of applause it deserves. Meltryllis, of course, accuses you of being sarcastic, but you would _never_.

Eventually, though, you're finished the banter, the cookie, and the second cup of tea you don't remember ordering; she's finished her carrot cake and her third mug of coffee. The waitress seems a little concerned at how quickly Meltryllis is drinking. You suppose it would look strange to someone who didn't know who and what she was.

"So," you say, leaning back a bit in your wicker-spun chair and fiddling with the strings of your jacket, "I guess it's time to face the music. Prepare to dance with the Devil. Stare into the abyss and watch it blink."

"Ritsuka, my love," Meltryllis says, voice dripping with thick, triple-chocolate indulgence, "it's just shopping."

"It is cruel and unusual punishment," you say, pouting. "Help me, Meltryllis. You're my only hope."

She raises an elegant eyebrow. "What will I get if I do?"

"My undying adoration and affection?"

Meltryllis hums. "I'll think about it."

"My Giselle is a harsh mistress," you say, flopping down onto the table in exaggerated despair. Your hair spills across the tablecloth like a field of marigolds spun through with spiderwebs. "Always bullying her poor, defenceless wife."

"Now, now, Ritsuka," she says, sly as can be, "if you keep complaining like that you might convince me to stop."

You lift your chin up to frown at her, eyes narrowed.

But you don't say another word.


	4. Cosmodicy

Your room is not a mess.

Your room is the memory of a mess. That soft, lingering moment after everything's been packed away. Over there, an empty patch of oak-stained carpet between the wardrobe and the wall; you can still feel the terrifying gravity of the shoe-pile Meltryllis insisted that you sort out as part of her never-ending crusade to force upon you some semblance of taste. Over here, the button-down neatness of the tallboy, every drawer carefully shut rather than flailing out like a dog's tongue in summer.

There's something almost surgical about it, the organic, t-shirt-on-the-bedpost chaos of living cut away, excised by the polite scalpel of the neighbour's raised eyebrow and the stranger laughing behind their hands. Is this really your room anymore? Or is it someone else's idea of your room, rigid, cage-bar perfection trapping you in the polished veneer of respectability that they'll use to clone you, clever girl?

What a joke. You live in a society that values the appearance of civility, of neatness, of _fitting in_ more than it likes to think of the well-washed, freshly-starched masses as _people_. It makes you want to start a revolution. To rise up and overthrow the dark and twisted hegemony of, of, of _folded bedsheets_.

"My love," Meltryllis says, bright eyes watching you flail about on the covers next to her, "are you finished being ridiculous yet?"

You pout up at her, rolling over to settle your head on her thighs. Mmm. She's soft and cool. Like being hugged by the sea. "Cleaning is bad civilisation."

"Cleaning is one of the things that _makes _us a civilisation." One hand plays idly with your hair, delicate strands of orange and white curling around her fingers. Occasionally she scratches your head with her nails, soothingly sharp. "I knew you spent too much time around those barbarians."

"Then we should—" you interrupt yourself with a yawn and snuggle a bit further into her lap, "—ban civilisation. Cities are overrated. We should wander the steppe with the wind at our back and no thought but to where it takes us."

Meltryllis bats you on the nose, too fast for you to do anything but blink in befuddlement like a drowsy cat that's just been picked up. "If you want to get rid of me, you could just say so."

"...what?"

"Don't tell me you haven't thought your proposal through, Ritsuka," she says, raising a well-coiffed eyebrow. "Without civilisation, there wouldn't be computing. Without computing, there wouldn't be the Moon Cell. And without the Moon Cell…"

No Meltryllis.

"I changed my mind. Civilisation is the best thing in the history of ever. Hail… agriculture?"

It's ironic, really. You know the truth of the fires of Rome, when Nero watched her city burn; you have seen, first-hand, Inanna's Descent into the Underworld. But you don't know anything about the _facts_. To you, history is a smile flashed across a hallway, strong arms carrying you across rubble and flame, champagne ether slipping through your fingertips. It is a table crowded by the laughter of half a dozen kings; it is cheeks heated by a god's innocent praise; it is a betting pool about who will fall into whose bed and when.

History, to you, is _people_.

"What are you thinking, my love?" Meltryllis asks, gentle as the fingers she settles on your waist, drawing you closer. "You're frowning."

So you are.

"Just… remembering," you say. Then you laugh, a little wry. A little dry. "I swear I've thought more about Chaldea in the past three days than I did in the year before."

"It would be strange if you hadn't."

"It's been ten years. I didn't think I'd miss it this much." You hold her hands to your hips, closing your eyes and tracing patterns on the backs of her palms. _Ai. Shi. Te. Ru. _

"Of course you do. I do too. The years I spent there… that was the second-greatest time of my life. Not just for what we did. For who we did it alongside."

"Second-greatest?"

She's smiling. You can hear it in her voice. "I married you, didn't I?"

You can't help it. You start laughing, shoulders shaking, stomach jolting. "You are _so_ cheesy."

A hand tilts your jaw back. You open your eyes to see her head above yours, upside-down from where you lounge in her lap, framed by the white ceiling. Her hair tickles your face like sweet-smelling grass. "You say this, Ritsuka, as if _I _was the one writing 'I love you' on _your _skin."

Oh. She noticed. "T-that's not the point here."

"I'll show you the _point_," she says, and kisses you.

You forget what you were complaining about embarrassingly quickly.

Time passes.

You feel warm and languid, stretched out across the soft fur of your covers, the fan spinning slow drifts of air across your back. In the background, the low whistle of the kettle and the chatter of the Indian podcast Meltryllis likes to listen to while she works. If you took a photo of this moment, spread it across a gallery's walls for all to marvel at the sight, you'd call it 'contentment'. A well-loved girl in a well-loved room.

Too bad you're leaving tomorrow. All your luggage is packed—it's why everything is so clean. There's nothing left to make a mess. Reines' driver is due to collect it all in a couple of hours, and the two of you the morning after. You're mentally exhausted by the whole thing, and you didn't even really get to help: Meltryllis is terrifyingly organised when she needs to be. You just followed orders. Really, who's the Master here?

(No-one, because you did not marry your Servant. You married your wife. If that makes any sense).

Not much remains to be done before you go. But not much is not the same as nothing, and that's what has you tremble to still-unsteady feet, find wherever your singlet went, and slip down the hall to the workshop you installed where the study was supposed to be.

It's a simple thing, your workshop. Most magi would be offended by the fact you call it one if you're honest: it's just a single, cramped room dominated by an ornate round table. Not _the_ Round Table, of course. You are the heir to many things, but not that. Never that.

There aren't even wards to keep it safe; where Reines has three Bounded Fields on her desk alone, ready and waiting, you have the fact the lights don't have a switch. Instead you clap your hands and photons catch fire, casting away the darkness. Thank you, Edison. Thank you, Tesla. This is what your genius has led to: a girl so lazy she bought clap lights because finding the switch took effort. Praise be.

You edge around the table, trailing metal fingers on the hard ebony, and approach the painting hanging on the back wall. It's a lovely thing. Six levels of blasphemous too, but Jeanne said it was okay: since all Magi were heretics anyway, you couldn't be more damned than you were already. Not that you were particularly worried. When it comes to gods with designs on your soul… well, let's just say there's a line.

Rather than unlocking some secret latch to reveal the safe behind the painting, however, you simply reach through it: the you in the centre, holding court in Chaldea's cafeteria surrounded by your apostles, ripples as your artificial arm slips into the canvas like you're plunging it into a pool. You fiddle around in the back, passing over the snake-headed warhammer, the eight-armed statue riding a lion, the vase full of sun-bright flowers, an old, cracked stone tablet, a sword that smells like lightning, and finally—there.

When you pull your arm out, you're holding a glove. A gauntlet, really. Sleek white alloy hammered from the bones of Tiamat's children and the clockwork gear-teeth of London, weeping. It gleams in the pale yellow light of the workshop, bright as smiling. There's a hum in the back of your skull, pins and needles in your thoughts. You take a breath and slip your true hand into the gauntlet.

There's no great rush of power. No cataclysmic detonation that ripples your flesh until it feels like you're falling off your bones. No cold, empty hunger that slithers through your circuits as it stares out from between the stars. Nothing at all except the faint shadow of coffee on your tongue. You brush a flower that isn't there from your hair. Laughter bubbles up from a place that isn't yours.

You've always been an indifferent magi. Yours is not that which stirs the skies, no: you are a _conduit_ for greatness. The whirring mechanism, the lightning-rod, the well-traveled road. The shadow of someone else's strength.

The door to their own glory.

Fitting, then, the only true piece of magic you can call your own.

Fitting, then, the name it bears.

With a thought, the Key turns.

_For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. _

Seventy-two stars ignite beneath your brow. Each one is a gift freely given, a lesson taught without obligation or expectation. They crowd your skull, pumping up your brain like air into a balloon until you tremble in the confines of your own body. You sway a little, grabbing hold of the table to keep yourself standing. A snap of your fingers douses your head in water, bitterly cold.

Of course, you've forgotten how much more potent magic used to be: where once you would have transmuted barely half a glass from the air around you, now a veritable waterfall soaks every inch of your body, plastering your hair to your forehead and your singlet to your skin. You shriek in surprise at a pitch you'll never admit you can reach—Meltryllis is there in a single moment, brandishing a fresh cup of tea like a sword.

She's still laughing a full thirty seconds later as she weaves the water off your skin with quick, clever fingers, assembling it into a swirling orb like the ones you saw in that documentary on the International Space Station and flicking it away to the sink. You glare at her with all the ire of a cat who stepped in an unforeseen puddle.

"This is _not funny_," you say with as much affronted dignity as you can manage.

"It is a little bit," she says, smiling. "Would you like some tea to warm up?"

A few pages ruffled through a mental index, a drip of mana, and you don't notice the chill. If your first few breaths pump out like steam from a locomotive, so what?

"I'll be fine," you say. "Thanks."

Silence, for a short while.

"Today's the day, then. So to speak." Meltryllis stares down into the swirl of her teacup as she speaks.

"Technically tomorrow's the day."

She glances up at you, under her thin eyelashes, and you suck in a breath. "Pedantry doesn't suit you, my love."

"Don't be mean," you say after a couple of seconds to recover. "I thought this marriage was a two-way street! If you're allowed to bully me, I'm allowed to bully you! This is oppression!"

Her smile does dangerous things to her cheekbones. "Are you sure this is the way you want this conversation to go?"

You swallow, mouth dry. "So. Today's the day."

Meltryllis sets her teacup down on the table and leans up against the wall, folding her arms. The sleeves of her blouse fade into the white that frames her. "It has been a long time since last we went to war."

"War is a… strong word," you say. _Metal shrieks. A thousand hoof-beats still softer than your thundering heart. A roar that splinters stone and bone. The deep, bass _thrum _of hatred, weaponised. You are the valley of the shadow of death. _"I'm not sure if I want to use it."

"Forgive me my hyperbole," Meltryllis says. It would be sarcasm to anyone else. From anyone else. "But I will not stand idly by and allow a fool to play games with your heart, my love. I would sooner drown the world."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that." The stars that constellate your brow spark in time with your thoughts. Words of power in languages only the dead speak tremble on your tongue. You close your eyes and let them fade, mist in the morning of your will. "I quite like this life we've found ourselves in."

"So do I," she says, "and I will do what I must to protect it."

"At least wait until we know what's going on before you get all Biblical on it, Meltryllis." Your voice is gentle but your stare is firm.

"Those in glass houses…" Meltryllis says, glancing meaningfully at your left hand. She softens, though, uncrossing her arms and taking a couple of steps forward to lace her fingers with yours and lift them up to her lips. "But if you insist, I suppose I can humour you for now, my love."

You kiss her for no other reason than because you can. "Thank you."

* * *

That night, your sleep is fitful.

This, of course, is in no way unusual. You haven't slept well for years.

But you did not expect—

_—that it would feel like this. _

_You stare at your hands. _

_At the space where one of your hands should be. _

_You swear the fingers are still there. You try to twitch them. It feels like… it feels like when you were a child and you tried to reach up and steal an onigiri from the kitchen counter when your mother wasn't looking but you were too short. You strained and strained and _strained _but you just _couldn't reach _and it made you cry so hard she gave you one anyway. _

_But there's no mother here for you now. No rice balls. And you're too tired to cry. _

_You flop backward on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Cold stone stares back, dark as thunderclouds. Your cell is—well, they don't _call _it a cell, but you know that's what it is. What else would you call a room that you're not allowed to leave? _

_Ah, look at you. The world was halfway to ending a week ago and _you're _the one feeling sorry for herself. Such arrogance. Such foolishness. You don't deserve to be sad. But that doesn't stop you from closing your eyes. Maybe you can get to sleep again. _

_When you dream you still have two arms. _

_A weight beside you, the mattress dipping down with a low creak. A hand in your hair, slow and soothing. Grass beneath the storm and well-oiled leather. "Do not weep, Master. There is nothing here worth your tears." _

_Oh. Your cheeks are wet. You didn't notice. You bring your hand up to wipe them aw—but of course you have no hand. You have no _arm_. For fuck's sake how are you this _stupid _you idiot girl? Gritting your teeth with a curse in a language no Magus speaks, you wrench yourself up off the bed and slam your feet onto the stone. It's petty. It's dramatic. But you need the violence of it. The power. It makes you feel good. _

_(It doesn't. Just a different kind of bad. But even that can help, some days). _

_Behind you, Minamoto-no-Raikou carefully smooths the sheets down until it is as if you never moved. _

_"Not worth my tears?" you snap, spinning to face her. You don't care why she's here. You don't care _how_ she's here. You have been alone for six days and all you want to do is scream. "_Not worth my tears, _Raikou_? _My best friend cut off my fucking arm to save the world. And now that I'm not drunk on my own grandeur all I can think is that she should have taken my fucking head with it because at least then I wouldn't have to live knowing she had to!"_

_She sits there, watching you with quiet, placid patience. A pool to the stone of your thoughts. Throw all you like, child. I will be here when you are done. _

_"Well? Are you just going to sit there? Listen to me howl about how much I want to die?" Three frenzied steps and all five of your remaining fingers curl like claws into the padded armour that covers her shoulders. It hurts but at least you're feeling something. "What sort of Servant are you? I just told you I wanted something. So _give it to me_!" _

_"Once upon a time, there was a girl." Raikou ignores you, content to let your fingers slacken as the mania leaves you in one great rush like somebody's punched the air out of you. Soon your hand on her shoulder is the only thing keeping you from collapsing. "It took her so long to be born that most had forgotten she was ever going to be alive. And when she broke out of that bleeding womb she woke with fangs sharp enough to rend the world and eyes bright with all the tears she'd never been allowed to cry." _

_She looks up, staring at you with eyes stained royal and a face whose features are a touch too narrow to be human. _

_Oh. _

_It was hard to tell, at first. You lost it in the throes of your selfish rage. But this isn't Raikou. This is—_

_"—Ushi Gozen." The demon sleeping in the corner of Raikou's smile. The child she used to be. The part of herself she so hated that she was one blow short of killing herself just to kill it too. _

_Ushi Gozen grins, bright as a sword beneath the moon. "Well done, Master. Would you like to hear the rest of the story?" _

_"I've already heard it," you say, slumping down to sit beside her. You lean back on your arms to study the ceiling a second time—but you only have one arm and you're not expecting the weight and you fall and she catches you just before you clip the mattress with your nose. You sigh. You're too tired to be anything but bitter now. "Don't you remember? I almost broke my wrist punching you out. Guess I'll never fucking have to worry about _that _again."_

_"Don't be silly," Ushi Gozen says. She lowers you gently the rest of the way onto the covers. The long, trailing strands of her ponytail brush against your cheek. No wonder Raikou was so renowned. Even her hair shares the shade of emperors. "I wasn't telling you about _me_, Master." _

_She rests her hands on her thighs, one close to the hilt of her sword, and speaks again. You decide to humour her. At least it's company. _

_"That girl saw the world in all its shimmering, shining splendour. And she didn't care. All she'd ever known was how it broke. All she'd ever been was a clot on the scars of history. Why not just let it bleed?" Ushi Gozen shakes her head. "In this way, she was very much like an oni. She felt the emptiness we feel when we look upon a human we do not desire for food or pleasure or war. It matters not if they die. It matters not if they live. They are ants before the sun of our desire, cowering in the shadows we cast."_

_You—well, you're not that stupid. You know what she's talking about. You know _who _she's talking about. _

_Of course you do. _

_You know that girl better than anyone else. _

_"Do you see now, Master?" Ushi Gozen looks at you. Kindness sits strangely on her face. She's too sharp for sympathy. "To hate that girl would be to hate myself. And I have tried that. Over and over and over again. I have felt that blade an inch from my throat and I would have _revelled _in it." _

_She shakes her head again. _

_"And I would have been a fool. You have taught me that. You are the mirror that reflects all I could be. All that we all could be. To look at you is to know that there is someone who _believes_. How, then, could we not believe in you? We have loved you as you have loved us, Master. All that remains is for you to love yourself."_

_You can't help yourself. You laugh until you cry and then you laugh again. Until your throat and eyes are sore with it. Ushi Gozen remains by your side. Watching. Waiting. _

_"Why you?" you ask eventually. "Why not Kiara? Why not Kama? Why _you_?" _

_"Regret." _

_You don't have much to say to that. _

_"Sleep, Master," she says, Raikou's words in Ushi Gozen's mouth. "I will be here when you wake."_

_So you do. _

_This time you do not dream. _


	5. A Warm Welcome

Meltryllis takes you swimming.

It's the middle of winter in England and Meltryllis takes you _swimming_. Sure, the pool is indoors, warm and well-lit, the walls a cozy ochre sandstone that reminds you of old deserts and older friends. It's not like you're out in the Thames dodging boats and hypothermia both. But still. _Swimming_.

It's absurd. Absolutely, patently, adorably _absurd_.

You've been married for ten years and she can still surprise you.

You hope she never stops.

The water crests over you as you paddle up and down the lane, your arm and your legs idly splashing you forward with no real thought of where you're going or how long it takes to get there. Sometimes you burst out into little giggles as soft tendrils tickle you across the cheek, the waist, the bottoms of your feet. There's a smile on your face that only the marbled floor can see, too far away for you to reach even if you tried to stand.

There's no-one else here. Perhaps there should be, but you cheated a little; a gloved hand pressed to a doorway on your way in, a quiet word with the universe. A moment alone in love. Samsara Ritsuka, if you will.

Meltryllis slips back into the pool like a spear—a spear through your heart, specifically, because between the sleek sin of her one-piece swimsuit and the powerful elegance of her body through the water you are finding it awkwardly complicated to stay buoyant. Stupid sexy Servants. She surfaces right in front of you, whipping the soaked mass of her hair into picture-perfect disarray and exposing the slender line of her neck.

You lick the inside of your lips, shifting in the water to poke her in the shoulder with a finger. She's actually cooler than the pool, her skin slick against your own. "You did that on purpose."

It probably says something extremely embarrassing about your relationship that Meltryllis doesn't even bother to hide the smug curl of her lips—or that it distracts you enough that you don't realise she's pressed a kiss to your nose until the fresh sweetness of her scent briefly replaces the subtle chlorine of the pool. "My love, I do _everything _on purpose."

You give that exactly the response it deserves—namely, splashing her in the face. It's a fantastic splash, too: you hit the surface of the pool so hard the side of your palm is sore and the wall of water that slaps Meltryllis in the face is taller than you are.

For a moment, you revel in triumph as she stares at you in shock and betrayal. Take _that_. You are fierce and mighty and she should tremble before you!

Then you remember you just started a water-fight with an actual literal ocean.

"I take it back, I take it back, I _take it back!_" you shriek as you're chased around the pool by a dozen waves at once. Meltryllis just laughs, slipping from _plie _to _releve _to _saute _as she warms up, dancing between the lanes as if the water was solid earth. It ripples beneath her steps but she does not sink.

The sight of her, eyes closed, the sharp lines of her cheeks softened by joy, lavender hair fanning out and whipping droplets around her like rain as she leaps and spins with easy, planetary inevitability—this is beauty, seen. A slow warmth in your chest, an unbidden curl of your lips, an itch in your fingers to take hers and sway to the song of your heartbeats.

Then three waves collapse on your head and you go under, flailing wildly.

Truly, your wife is ruthless. Even losing yourself to the love of her—to the gentle, perfect now that is every moment you see her face—isn't enough to save you from her revenge.

Some time later, you end up bobbing your way to her, softly buffeted by currents that are, of course, completely coincidental and have nothing to do with Meltryllis at all. You're floating on your back when you bump into her ankles; from down here, the well-cut stone of the ceiling is replaced by the well-cut lines of her blue-and-white swimsuit, deliciously tight to her waist and distractingly ruffled around her chest. Yours, by contrast, is fair plainer, a simple black two-piece that sets off your hair nicely and does little to hide the old scars that constellate your skin, like whatever god painted you ran out of brushes and had to finish up with a scalpel.

Meltryllis lets herself sink until she's standing on the bottom of the pool, chin still above the water's surface because she's a dirty cheater instead of a _perfectly average_ Japanese woman. Her hands circle your waist from below, pulling you closer so your head bumps into the crook of her neck; her fingers start idly massaging your hips in slow, smooth circles. Much like your waist, those hips are a little thicker than they used to be—a combination of age and a life no longer lived in dancing on the edge of the Damocles. You're not really complaining.

"Are you sorry now?" she asks, kneading your flesh with gentle strokes. You hum with pleasure. "For splashing me? That was very rude, you know."

Because you are a sweet and delicate maiden, you don't make any of the jokes that spring to mind; rather, you just reach underwater and pinch her on a bare thigh. "You _attacked me with tidal waves._"

"I think that's a minor exaggeration."

You decide not to dignify her completely irrelevant argument with a reply. Instead, you just… drift, letting her languid caress anchor your body as your mind falls free. The water laps against you, a soft, soothing susurration; your hair is plastered to your forehead, just too short to fall annoyingly into your eyes. You feel like a forest after flame, aching with heat and empty of everything but potential.

You feel like you're in love.

"I'm amazed you remembered," you say, a little drowsy. It's difficult to snuggle closer to her when you're flat on your back in the middle of a pool, but you give it your best shot. "Must've been years since I told you that story."

"It's easy to remember things about you," she says, voice quiet and sure. Like the press of the ring on the third finger of your true hand. "Though the supercomputing does help."

"Cheater," you say fondly. "I always loved swimming as a kid. Used to beg Mum and Dad to take me to Miyakojima every weekend. I think the first thing I bought with the money from waitressing at that dinky little cafe—ai ya, I can't even remember its name—was a bikini. It was super cute, too. I wonder what happened to it."

"I think this one is 'super cute' too." Meltryllis fiddles idly with the side-ties hanging from your hips. "I like the little bows."

"You would, you're the one I had to ask to tie them." You don't need to open your eyes to know she's smiling. "I don't have your elegance, and I've never been—well, let's just say I don't _bounce_, so cute is what I've always aimed for. I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but it even got me a wife."

Shadow on your face, lips on your lips. Meltryllis' nose brushes against your chin as she bends over, cool enough that you shiver, just a little. Or maybe that's the kiss. You've always been… easily convinced. "Oh dear. I hope she's not jealous of us, my love. That could be awkward."

You squeeze her fingers. "Don't worry. I'm pretty sure she's fine with it."

"She'd have to be." Meltryllis kisses you again, slow and lingering—this time you open your eyes to watch her as she moves away, circling you in the water until she's standing between your legs instead. "After all, if life has taught me anything, it's that the sight of you in a swimsuit is terribly, terribly popular. She'd go mad with jealousy otherwise."

She pulls you a little closer, fingers squeezing your thighs. From another angle, you might be straddling her—a mental image that is _really not helping _right now when her voice saunters down the octaves like that, falling over you like satin and silk.

"You know," Meltryllis continues, leaning forward and propping her arms up in the water until it's like she's caging you against a wall, the trailing strands of her hair pooling wet and low on your belly, "maybe she still does. Maybe every time she sees someone else thinking of what you look like in something so adorably skimpy she wants nothing more than to remind them exactly _who _that thought belongs to."

"Yo—" you swallow, choking on your own breath, "—you're ridiculous. What bargain-basement bodice-ripper did you get that line from anyway? I bet it was probably written by some moron who conflates toxic codependency with healthy romance. I can't believe you thought you'd get anywhere saying something like that. What is this, the Paleolithic? Let me guess, next you'll pick me up and throw me over your shou—"

"Is that an invitation?"

"I _hate you_."

"No you don't," she says against your lips, and then there is no more need for words.

* * *

Gray meets you at the airport.

Well, more accurately, she meets you in the surprisingly luxurious waiting room set aside for you and Meltryllis as you while away the hours until it's finally your departure time. It seems that even the power of money and magecraft both cannot triumph against the behemothic congestion of Heathrow Airport.

You're shuffling a deck when she slips through the doorway, her footsteps softer than the whisper of card against card. Her hood is up as it always is, dark as thunderclouds and casting a deep shadow over her face. You wonder if they thought her straight from renfaire when she was passing through the airport proper, thanks to the white-furred collar of her cloak and the ornate scrollwork that festoons her short, old-fashioned dress.

"Ah! I see you made it," you say, whisking the two of clubs out of the deck and then dealing the cards into three equal piles onto the table. Small and cut from flawless mahogany, it really doesn't match the faded sneakers you're tapping against its legs. "How was the trip?"

Gray takes a seat on the leather couch opposite you and Meltryllis, collecting her cards and fanning them out behind her fingers. As she moves, the chandelier swaying overhead dapples warm yellow light across her cloak until it seems spun from sunfire. "Reines hugged me when I left, which is the closest I think I've ever seen her to saying sorry."

"That isn't something you should sound so proud of," Meltryllis says, dropping the three of clubs on the table and shuffling her hand idly as she waits for you to play.

"I remember what you were like when we first met, Meltryllis," Gray says as you throw down the ace of clubs. "Shush."

Your wife raises an eyebrow, but doesn't reply. Gray takes that as the admission of defeat it is, tilting her chin up in satisfaction—definitely something she's picked up from Reines, she never used to be so cocky—and playing the queen of clubs. The trick is yours. You sweep your hand across the table, sliding the cards out of the way and deliberating on what to do next. Nobody was short-suited that round, so you're probably safe to lead with a club. Probably.

The round continues, as each round usually does, with you slowly losing because you're trying to play against an artificial intelligence who also knows your every cue and a girl who's spent half her life learning from Waver Velvet and Lord Reines el-Melloi Archisorte.

But the fun isn't in winning.

Well, it _is_, and one day you will _crush them beneath your feet_, but—look.

The point is that Meltryllis and Gray get hilariously competitive and it will never get old watching them lock eyes the way other people might lock swords every time a trick ends.

And so the three of you while away the time until you're called to the plane.

Naturally, you don't win even once.

Truly the world is a blighted place, harsh and cruel and full of merciless card sharks who would love nothing more than to fleece the very shirt off your back if they thought they could get away with it.

"My love," Meltryllis says, "you vastly overestimate how much effort it takes me to get your shirt off."

Gray—that blasted, benighted traitor!—stifles her giggles behind her fingers as you try to tackle Meltryllis down onto the couch and find yourself deflected into her lap, hands soft on your shoulder and hip.

In the end, you settle for glaring across the table at Gray until she stops laughing as you rest your head on the cushion of Meltryllis' thighs.

Nobody respects you around here anymore. It's totally unfair.

* * *

You recline back in your seat, falling into the sumptuous pillows and letting them swallow your aching shoulders. There's no such thing as too much swimming, but sometimes your body doesn't agree.

Thank goodness that Reines is pathologically incapable of accepting anything but decadence—the custom lounge-chairs arranged in the cabin of her private jet probably each cost as much your motorbike, especially enchanted as they are, but _wow _are they comfortable. Like sleeping in a pile of kittens. Very, very expensive kittens.

You smooth your dress over your thighs, idly admiring the contrast between your fingers—stained pale by the English excuse for 'weather'—and the dark fabric. It's almost as striking as the contrast between you and the rest of the plane. You imagine you must look quite out of place, a plain once-country girl pressing her Magi-Mari socks into the rich-furred carpet and flipping through a cheap magazine to the rich violins whispering out from the speakers hidden within the cabin's well-burnished ceiling.

(Never mind, of course, that the music choice was you and Meltryllis overruling Gray shortly after take-off).

Speaking of Meltryllis and Gray, the former is stretching out on one of the beds, shirt riding up and thick headphones covering her ears as she watches choreography videos on her tablet, and the latter is closing a Miss Fisher novel and leaning over from her own chair to tap you on the knee with it.

"Ritsuka?" she asks. "Are you busy?"

"Not really," you say, dropping your magazine in the magazine-holder on the side of the chair and yawning. "What's up?"

Meltryllis glances over at the sound of your voices, smiles at you, and returns her attention to her tablet.

"We're not that far away from Chaldea," Gray says, rainforest eyes as soft and serious as her voice. "I just thought I'd, well—"

She looks down into her lap, fisting her fingers in her skirt.

"I thought I'd ask how you were feeling. About it. If—if that's okay?"

You laugh, just a little. "Of course it's okay."

Gray brightens, brushing one of her cobweb bangs back into place. You take the chance to cross your ankles and wiggle a little deeper into your chair. Mmm. Comfy.

"I guess I'm… fine?" You immediately shake your head, hair brushing against the headrest. "No, that's wrong. I wish that everything _was _fine. That we weren't on this plane. That Mash was—that Mash was well. I always wish that. And I'm still angry, still sad, still twitching my fists and looking for something to punch. But I'm not looking so hard that I'll punch anything else along the way, if that makes any sense?"

You sigh. Feelings are complicated. But if there's one thing you've learned in your career, it's how much talking can help. How much someone _listening _can help.

"I'm a bit nervous about what Chaldea will be like when I get there: how much will hurt me by nostalgia and how much will hurt me because I don't recognise it at all. And I'm worried that I might not like finding out the answers. But I can't do anything about that, and it's not like I'm going in alone.

"So really I suppose the best way I can put it is that I'm feeling. And I think I will be for a while." You shrug with a confidence you don't have, but they say the best way to make it is to fake it. Or something like that. "But it's like Arash always said. This, too, shall pass."

Gray nods slowly, hood slipping down almost to her nose before she pushes it back up. "I can sympathise."

Then she blinks in surprise as you lean forward in your chair, steepling your fingers beneath your chin in a gesture you definitely didn't steal from Rin and staring directly into her eyes. "And _speaking _of feelings, dear Gray, a little birdy told me something about Reines and _hugging_. Care to comment?"

"Ah—um—that is—" she looks around the cabin, but the cockpit door is closed, Meltryllis is focusing so intently on her tablet and exaggeratedly bopping along to her headphones that you almost can't tell she's struggling not to laugh, and the only other person on the plane is you. Gray has nowhere to run. All according to plan.

Your smile, lit by the faux-Victorian lamps on the walls, is positively _smug_.

"Traitor," Gray says, puffing out her cheeks.

She should have known you would have your righteous and well-deserved vengeance for traitorously abandoning _you_ to Meltryllis only a few scant hours earlier. Ritsuka Coralli _always _remembers.

* * *

Some time later, you are woken from a catnap by blaring alarms and a harsh, robotic voice over the intercom. They hammer into your skull like falling stones. Like rubble and metal and bone crushed beneath a collapsing roof.

"_Alert. Alert. Thaumic envelope disengaged. Noetic energy spikes exceeding ambient levels. Alert. Alert." _

By the end of the second word you are already on your feet, ripping your veins open and letting the stars fall in. Meltryllis to your left, Gray at the door to the cockpit, you can't see the danger but that's nothing new. Your heart slows as mana seeps through your body, cold as the ash at the end of flame, crushing the last of your drowsiness as it sharpens you to survival.

"Melt," one syllable is faster than two, "what's happening?"

It's Gray who answers, poking her head back out of the cockpit. You can hear the homunculus pilot's frantic whispers in the background but they're irrelevant so you discard them. "We entered Chaldea's airspace. Something from their direction immediately wiped our Bounded Fields. Like tripping a circuit-breaker."

Like running into Medea's knife. Or Musashi's karma. Or Meltryllis' _id_es_. Or—you're wasting time. Focus on solutions, not problems.

You move as you think, ripping the cover off your stump, grabbing your arm out of the dock beside the bed, and shoving it into the socket. Holy _shit_ that hurts. You're out of practice.

"Restore them," you order, taking the Key from Meltryllis—she's frowning at your shoulder, you'll apologise later—and staggering as you thrust your fingers into the glove without giving yourself time to adjust. "_Fuck_. Okay. And if you can't restore them, then—"

Your thoughts come up short. It's hard to hear them over the alarm. _Alert. Alert._

"Then—"

Then _what? _

"Ritsuka?" Meltryllis asks, hand on your arm and concern in her ocean eyes. You can barely feel her touch; there's too much mana beneath your skin, creeping across your flesh like ice over the tundra. "You're shaking."

Oh. You'd almost forgotten. You haven't been in the field for ten years.

You've—you've lost your touch.

Gray, on the other hand, hasn't. She barks a series of orders to the pilot, an edge to her voice that's half King Arthur and half Zhuge Liang, and plucks her scythe out of her necklace: the weapon is a beautiful thing, as long as she is tall, blue and gold with a blade bright as a crescent moon. The emergency lights of the cabin dye it a murderous red. You find your fists unclenching, slow and easy, as it sucks the excess mana from the air around you. It's a strange feeling. Like the opposite of being winded.

"No chant?" Meltryllis asks.

"Experience is its own crutch," Gray says. She turns to you and for a moment you marvel at the dichotomy. Much like you, most of what she's wearing is a singlet so ill-fitting it obviously belongs to someone else (though yours has a lot less silk). But this way, without a hood to hide the regal slant of her nose or a cloak to conceal the dangerous cut of her shoulders and arms, her sleep-tousled casualness takes on a whole new air.

This isn't Gray, old friend and occasional double-agent in the war against the tyranny of smugness.

This is the Gravekeeper. To see her with her scythe out and her jaw set to war is only natural. Something would be wrong if she _didn't_ look like she'd rolled out of bed with a blade already at hand.

Gray opens her mouth to say something and the whole plane shudders like the surface of a drum. Sounds like one too: a vast, echoing _gong_. Meltryllis catches you before you finish stumbling, perfectly balanced even on the thick carpet. She's still in her dancing legs, long and silver and carved with intricate Sanskrit poetry; she mustn't have stopped reading when you fell asleep.

You squeeze her hip and step away. The air tastes a little different now. Or, rather, the air _doesn't_ taste a little different now. The faint spice below the recycled emptiness of the air conditioning is back.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Turn the Key. Open your skull to the sky and let the gods in. Hear them sing of the world you cannot see. You swallow ozone over your tongue. "That was one of the Bounded Fields. The one based on… something about games? Heads-up displays? Oh, it's a _sensor array_."

The flood of information is a spike through your skull, so you let it go. Mortal minds weren't built for even localised clairvoyance, and—well, you still count.

"_Alert. Alert. Thaumic envelope repairing. Noetic energy spikes exceeding ambient levels. Noetic energy spikes exceeding stable levels. Noetic trauma detected. Alert. Alert." _

As you finish speaking, Gray spins to face the cockpit. "Irina! What are we seeing?"

Irina—your panicked-looking pilot, her Einzbern-paleness flushed through with fear—is frantically waving her hands over a floating array of iridescent glyphs, most of which are actually the burned-out black of a blown fuse. "Nothing? There's nothing out there! Or it's too far away for us to see? But the distances are wrong. Every time I look they're different. We're supposed to be fifty klicks from Chaldea but the Field's telling me it's thirteen metres and forty-two kilometres and three hundred miles _this doesn't even measure in miles!_"

A quick glance past her—your eyes still sharpened by sorcery—shows that most of the mundane gauges across the plane's instrument board are flickering wildly. The chaos is straight out of Hollywood, one of those scenes that don't make sense because that's not how half those instruments _work _but still sell you on the tension and the danger and th—

Oh.

Of course.

"Melt. Illusion. Purge it."

There's no hesitation. Just a short, sharp nod and a spike of mana so loud it slaps you to the floor. It feels like diving into a wave at the wrong angle, the crest smashing down on your back as your body soaks through with sea-salt. You catch yourself on your hands and knees in time to see Gray cut the shockwave apart with her scythe.

The world starts bleeding. Air drips down your face like tears, cold and wet. The cabin, the couches, the bed, the light-strips, they all peel away in flakes of colour that liquefy and run until it seems the whole world is just a canvas held too long beneath the rain. Every breath you take is empty, choking your nose, your lungs, but you can't hear your own hacking coughs as you suffocate because the sound's being eaten too.

"_Alert. Alert. Thaumic envelope repaired. Noetic energy spikes receding. Noetic trauma anni—"_

Meltryllis' mouth moves and suddenly you can hear again. Breath again.

See again.

The cabin is back. It's just how it used to be. Not a single thing has changed. Not even the emergency lighting is different, still that deep atavistic crimson.

Not a single thing, that is, except there's no voice on the intercom. You are quite certain there never was.

Instead, there's an insistent beeping from the control panel. Irina blinks unsteadily, but presses a button next to it and a voice explodes from the radio.

"—or be destroyed. We repeat: unauthorised aircraft, you have entered prohibited airspace. Turn back or be destroyed. This is your final warning."

That's—that's the sort of message somebody needs to reply to.


	6. An Evening I'll Not Forget

"_—__or be destroyed. We repeat: unauthorised aircraft, you have entered prohibited airspace. Turn back or be destroyed. This is your final warning._"

You don't recognise the voice.

Of all the things that are wrong in this moment, that's the one that sticks out to you. You used to know every face, every name, every voice in Chaldea—you used to bake cupcakes for their birthdays, steal shitty Celtic jokes to distract them from missed anniversaries, and at one point you spent six hours convincing Arjuna to host a wedding because he'd actually _met _Agni and that was close enough if you didn't think about it too hard.

But there's some young boy on the other end of that radio, speaking with a shaky mix of pride and fear and self-importance as he threatens you with destruction, and all you can think is that _I don't know who you are_.

You're not sure what's worse: the arrogance of your bemusement or the realisation that you're being tested on the whole 'feeling' thing a lot earlier than you'd expected when talking to Gray only hours ago. But you don't have time for either right now, so you shove them under the metaphorical bed and turn to the object of your thoughts.

(No, not Meltryllis. Honestly, you're not _that _obsessed, and anyone who dares to say otherwise is a libellous slanderer who's probably jealous that you have such a lovely and perfect wife).

"Gray," you say, gesturing at the radio, "take the lead. Irina, keep us circling. Meltryllis and I will handle keeping us alive if things go south."

You don't have the right to command anyone in the room. Not anymore. Hell, in the immediate social hierarchy you're at the bottom—even Irina outranks you, because she's the pilot and if the rules for planes are anything like they are for captains on ships, that makes her practically God.

They listen anyway.

Irina starts flipping switches and pulling levers and doing whatever she's supposed to be doing; her snow-pale fingers slowly lose their nervous shake as she sinks into the routine and the plane barely trembles as it tilts sideways into a turn. You manage to keep your balance this time, but you don't let go of Meltryllis' hand from where she helped you up off the floor.

Gray steps to the blinking control panel beside Irina, silent and perfectly steady across the ruddy carpet. She breathes out, once, a short, sharp huff, and slaps her cheeks with her gloves a couple times. "Okay. Okay. _Comportment_, Gray. You can do it."

When she jabs the radio button and speaks again, she sounds nothing like herself. Each syllable slips out like her tongue is a whetstone and her words are the blade, and the fierce tension of the way she breathes makes it seem as if she's one inch from snapping completely—and gods save the poor fool who gives her a reason. She reminds you of Reines—and Waver—on their worst days and… well, that's probably where she learned it from.

"Who am I addressing?" she demands as you and Meltryllis slowly circle the main cabin, thankful that it's a private craft and you don't have to pick your way through fifty seats and just as many passengers in order to get to the windows. You press the Key against each one Meltryllis points to, mana slipping through your fingers like hoarfrost. "Well? Answer me, boy!"

You imagine the answer would have come far less swiftly if whoever was on the other end of the radio was able to see the way Gray was physically cringing with every word.

"O-Operator Sibbons," comes the reply, and then, stronger, "of the United Nations Office of Military Affairs. This is your final, official warning: in precisely thirty seconds, the order will be given to open fire on your aircraft. Turn back now or be destroyed."

"In thirty seconds, you insipid fool," Gray snaps, and you briefly wish you had your phone out and were recording because that's blackmail material for _years_ right there, "you will have declared war on a Lord of the Clocktower and that will only be the _beginning _of your error. I am Gray Pendragon, Gravekeeper of the El-Melloi, deputised to lead an investigation on behalf of the Lord of Modern Magecraft into the Kyrielight incident. My investigative team, who are on board this aircraft, includes an incarnate Servant and a prized employee of the Department of Policies and Law."

Aaw, she's so kind.

"So hold your bloody fire and get me someone with the appropriate authority to investigate why the missive that I _personally saw _Lord El-Melloi send announcing our visit and the details of our aircraft has apparently disappeared from your records in the space of twenty-four hours." She pauses the same way thunder does in the moments after lightning. "Actually, before you scurry off, tell me, _Operator Stibbons_: were you there for the Triumph? The Ouroboros? Because I was. And I don't think I remember your name."

Meltryllis giggles. "Oh, that one was _good_. I like this Gray."

You briefly imagine what it might be like to hear Meltryllis speak the same way Gray is now—all sharp, snide tones and domineering arrogance.

If the next ward you lay down comes out a little more violently than you'd intended, it's absolutely not because you were trying to use the rush of icy od through your veins as a cold shower.

"I—I'll get the Commander," Operator Sibbons replies. The line goes dead.

Gray half-collapses onto the control panel, holding herself up by grasping the empty co-pilot's chair, and sighs. "That was _exhausting_."

"Personally," you say, stepping away from the last window and brushing your fingers across Meltryllis' narrow hip as you pass her, "I give it a seven out of ten. You lost points for not hiding a laugh behind your hands, but that, what was it again, that _insipid fool _was particularly inspired."

You stop being able to hide your own laugh when Gray whirls on you, glaring fiercely. "If you so much as _think of _this conversation in Reines' vicinity I will tell her exactly why you missed our last scheduled luncheon and _word-for-word _what you were saying when I found you."

"W-what conversation?" you say very quickly, carefully looking absolutely anywhere but toward Meltryllis as if it will protect you from the weight of her smugness. Her terrible, terrible smugness. "I don't remember any conversation."

Gray points to her eyes and then to yours before turning back to the radio just as it crackles to life.

"A thousand apologies, Lady Pendragon…"

* * *

You've never been precisely sure _how _landing at Chaldea works.

There isn't exactly enough space for a proper runway, there are mountains all around, and the snow is heavy enough that you can't really use the word 'visibility' in a sentence anywhere near it. Except you just did but—look, that's not the point here. The point is that you are very impressed and slightly terrified that Irina has managed to bring Reines' jet to the ground so smoothly you don't even notice you've landed until Gray pokes you on the shoulder.

"We're here, Ritsuka," she says as you glance up from your magazine. You're not the biggest fan of handbags, especially not when you already know a few tricks to store your essentials in more… ephemeral places, but that _is _a very nice blue. It might clash with your hair, though—maybe for Meltryllis, then? "Irina will take care of our luggage, so if there's anything you'd prefer to keep with you I'd grab it now."

"Thank you, Lady Pendragon," you say, meeting her eyes with a dreadfully demure smile, "you're _most _kind."

Gray makes a sound like a steam train's whistle. "You—you—I _swear, _Coralli…"

Oh no. Last names. You might actually be in trouble here. Naturally you have a plan: you wouldn't have survived to be the fearless, dauntless, indomitable saviour of all humanity if you weren't quick at thinking on your feet. Which is why you immediately leap into action.

And hide behind Meltryllis.

You press your face into the taut stretch of her back, wrapping your hands around her slender waist. Her freshly-put-up ponytail brushes against your cheek, soft and sweet-smelling. "Save me!"

Meltryllis reaches over her shoulder to settle her fingers on the back of your neck and pats you a couple of times. Her skin is cooler than even the air-conditioned air—but not as cool as her voice. "No."

In a blur of motion that you don't quite understand happening until it's already over, she yanks you up by the back of your collar like a recalcitrant kitten with one hand, breaking your loose grip on her hips as easy as breathing, and dumps you in front of her—and right in front of Gray, too, who's staring at you with eyes like cut emeralds.

Very angrily cut emeralds.

_Eep._

You make another dash for the other side of the bed to get away from her but there's a black leather glove wrapped around your wrist. You can no more escape it than you could escape the grave. Your feet scrabble against the carpet as you're dragged inexorably backward. Are the cabin lights dimming? Why does the rich wood of the roof creak as if in pain? _What horrors await you when the beast has you trembling in it maw?_

"You are ridiculous," Gray says, but she's grinning too, bright enough to see her teeth. "Some days I wonder what Meltryllis sees in you."

"Myself, mostly," your wife replies without missing a beat and you blush to the roots of your hair. It makes your whole head look like a tomato. She—she _didn't_. "Just _look _at her. Is she not delightful?"

Gray lets you go to grasp at her stomach as she folds over with laughter, cloak brushing against the floor. You take the opportunity to march away from both of them in a huff, arms folded and skirt swishing as you move toward the back of the plane. Where did that nice, sweet girl vaguely scared of her own shadow go? Reines has corrupted her. Corrupted, you say!

* * *

The hangar floor is cold. So cold it sends a little shock up through the sole of your flats and you shiver. Less from any chill and more from—you remember dancing barefoot on this scuffed steel, Geronimo hammering out a beat on his double-sided drum as you spun from Bedivere to Ecchan to Susan from Security. It wasn't cold then.

You sigh, brushing away the thought and squeezing Meltryllis' fingers. Metal squeaks as she squeezes back. You took your glove off before you left the plane. Changed into a short-sleeved shirt, too, though you wish you'd thought to grab a vest. The harsh electric lighting of the hangar makes your whole arm gleam. There's something almost liquid about it. Like somebody bottled starlight and mercury and spun it into human shape—there the moon-crescent curve of the bicep, there the pipette-narrow fluting of the wrist.

Out in the world, you wear cloth around it like armour.

But here, in this place, where you made and broke yourself by turns, where someone slips poison or curses down an old friend's throat just to lure you in?

It _is _the armour.

_Remember what I was,_ you say with every silver-bright step, _and remember what I became_.

"This way, Miss Velvet," says Captain Kartik Vasquez, a dark-skinned man whose posture behind his black tactical gear betrays not even a hint of nervousness to be escorting such strange and prominent guests. Why would it? You carried flowers at his wedding, all those long years ago. A bright spot of joy in the darkness of the end of the world.

You hope, for Gray's sake, that she'll find time to visit his husband Vincent as well. Your wallet might hate the two of them for teaching her how to play poker, but they were still some of her first friends outside Waver's shadow.

"Captain!" one of the two guards with him hisses, scandalised. "That's _Lady Pend—_"

Kartik huffs a sigh as Gray smiles, soft with amusement. "I've met six different Lady Pendragons. One thing they all had in common: they hated being called that. And given Missus Coralli's here now too," he jabs a thick thumb over his shoulder at you, "for all I know you might turn a corner and run into one of them tomorrow, so try to remember that. Might save your dignity one day."

Into the rhythm of combat boots thumping against the floor, you speak. "You don't need to worry about that. My summoning days have been," you let go of Meltryllis and waggle your right hand at him, the light glinting off your metal palm, "cut short, you might say."

The other guard whips her head around to stare at you. "Wait, are you—"

"My wife," Meltryllis says, hugging you into her side. Her voice is proud, as if she's declaring a triumph equal to any Rome had ever known, but the whites of her eyes are like the foam at the crest of the wave of her gaze, which threatens to toss under any it crashes upon. "Yes, she is."

"Congratulations," Kartik says as he leads you out of the hangar and down a nostalgically white hallway. "I mean, not a single one of us was surprised when the Director told us, but still: congratulations!"

You—you probably shouldn't be shocked that Mash had told all your old colleagues about the wedding. You'd invited her, you couldn't _not_, but she hadn't been able to make it. Something about an urgent development that required her personal attention. The envelope she'd sent her apology in had smelled faintly of gunpowder and you're pretty sure there was a drop of blood staining her stress-scratched handwriting, so you'd forgiven her.

Metryllis hadn't.

"How is she?" you ask before you can stop yourself. Before you can wonder why you might want to.

"Physically? Perfectly fine." You blink in surprise. "You'll see what I mean when you get to meet her."

You're about to press him for answers when his dark eyes cut meaningfully to the guards he's walking with—the fresh-faced, slightly nervous women who didn't know how to talk to Gray and didn't even recognise you immediately. _Not here_, that glance says. You suppose it's fair enough. A pair of… footsoldiers, you guess, don't need to know every detail of their Director's condition, if they even know about it at all.

"That's… good to hear," you say, looking at Gray. She looks back and tips her shoulders in the faintest of shrugs. What does he mean, she's fine _physically_? Waver told you Mash was dying and even if you didn't trust that, Reines confirmed it. You were expecting her to be wasting away, or to be violently, horribly sick, or something like that. But if whatever's killing her is working on a far more insidious level, then—your left fist curls, tight as your heart feels in your chest.

A couple more well-lit corridors pass in silence—save, of course, for the _tap-tap-tap _of your various shoes and boots and heels against the vaguely ceramic floor—and the repetitive sameness of it all is starting to drive you mad. The Chaldea of old, you couldn't turn a corner without finding something splattered across one of the walls—usually artwork, sometimes an enchantment that rippled out music or a movie or, once (and briefly) a view into the men's change-rooms, rarely a Servant who'd scrape themselves off and hunt down whoever had bested them with a mad laugh and a smile wide as sunshine. It was aggressively, desperately _alive_ in a way only the end of the world could allow.

Here, now, it's all so—

"—clean," you say, tilting your head back to study the bone-white ceiling, unmarred by even a single scorch-mark. The hand not holding Meltryllis' brushes a few sunfire locks out of your eyes. "Chaldea is marvellously clean, Captain Vasquez. It must be quite a task."

"Hah, I should've figured," Kartik says quietly, coming to a halt outside a nondescript metal door. "Yeah, place's a little less… lively these days. You get used to it."

He taps a rapid series of numbers into the blocky keypad, too fast for you to follow. No doubt Meltryllis caught them all. There's a soft chime, and the door slides open. "Anywhere, here we are. The Vice-Director wanted to see Miss Velvet—important guests require important welcomes, you know how it is—while I settled in the rest of her entourage, which I guess is you two, Missus and Missus Coralli, as well as Miss…"

"von Einzbern," Irina says, the first word she's spoken since she stepped off the plane behind you—she's spent most of her time looking about, red eyes wide with curiosity. "Thank you for not assuming."

"Miss von Einzbern, then." Kartik turns to Gray and smiles. She smiles back. "Vince and I are in Room 213 if you ever have time to catch up. Won't hold it against you if you don't—Lord El-Melloi was scary enough _before _she was Lord El-Melloi."

"I'll look forward to it," Gray says, waving politely to the rest of you before slipping through the door like a particularly rustic shadow. It hisses shut behind her and it's only when Kartik and his fellow guards are escorting you down yet another identical hallway that you realise you don't actually know who the Vice-Director is. You knew Mash had been promoted all the way to the top, but it's been a long time since Chaldea's hierarchy concerned you. Oh well. There's one very obvious candidate.

"How's Da Vinci?" you ask. Years of speaking predominantly English has stolen the _-chan _from your tongue. You miss it, just a little. "Irrepressible as ever?"

"Da Vinci's Da Vinci," Kartik agrees.

* * *

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

You run the brush through the long, languid coils of Meltryllis' hair, one hand flat on the taut stretch of skin between her neck and shoulder to keep her steady. She hums with pleasure. It's not that you need to hold her there—she has a dancer's poise and a Servant's body, she could sit straight for weeks. You just want to touch her. To know that this is the truth.

"It doesn't feel quite real, does it?" Meltryllis asks like she can read your mind. She stretches her arms to the gray-sky roof, arching her back in a delicious curve, before dropping them back to rest them across your pyjama shorts and the bare legs beneath them. The two of you are propped up on the bed, Meltryllis shuffled a little back from your lap so you've actually got room to brush her hair properly. "To be here again, in this place, in this room."

"It was good to see Kartik again," you say. It's not an answer. Meltryllis squeezes your thighs and you're sure she understands anyway. "I was almost expecting not to recognise anyone until tomorrow."

Gray had dropped by to see you after her meeting: the three of you would be starting your 'audit', as she'd called it, tomorrow morning by meeting Mash and then, well, she'd left it at your discretion to decide what you wanted to do next. A thoughtful kindness. You're not quite sure if you'll be up to doing anything for the rest of the day, depending on how the meeting goes. It has the potential to—unbalance you, perhaps, is the kindest way to say it.

"It was rather transparent, was it not? Look, a familiar face! Just like you remember. So what reason do you have here to fear?" Meltryllis sniffs. "How positively plebeian."

You envy your wife's hair for a lot of reasons. One of them is that it can never, ever tangle—where yours can knot itself to madness if the weather gets particularly frisky, Meltryllis' is always sleek and smooth. The brush slides through it like skin across satin as you press a kiss to the back of her head. "That's a little cynical."

"I have sworn to protect you, my love," she says, as warm and gentle as the light from the lamps beside the bed, "and I will. If that means I must see suspicion where you see truth, if I must sneer and judge where you offer courtesy and kindness—well, I have always been close to cruelty. Better me than for you to force yourself into someone you're not."

You giggle, running your fingers up the side of her neck to brush against her cheek. She leans into the touch and for a moment there is nothing more important in the world than this. "And to think you call _me _dramatic."

Plucking a few loose, lavender hairs from the brush and watching them flutter down to clash violently against the white sheets, you resume your task as she speaks again. "I am a craftswoman and a dancer and I once broke time across my knee just to see you again. A little drama is to be expected, yes?"

"I suppose I can't argue with that."

For a while, silence, interrupted only by the rustle of fabric against skin as you shift occasionally in place and the soft susurration of the brush through her hair. Eventually you finish the last of your hundred strokes, lean forward to kiss the shell of her ear, and drop the brush on the bedside table with the clutter of wood against plastic. Meltryllis rolls herself over so she's facing you, elbows trapping your hips and waist framed by your thighs; she reaches up, perfectly balanced by the strength of her core as her elbows leave the bed, and pushes your ember-bright fringe out of your eyes before settling back.

"We should rest," she says as your gaze helplessly slips down the sharp beauty of her jaw, her slender throat, and becomes startlingly aware of the fact she's wearing a very loose singlet while leaning forward at a very dangerous angle. You swallow and quickly shake your head—ruining all her careful work with your fringe—before looking back up at her face. Meltryllis quirks an eyebrow, somewhere between vastly amused and vastly smug, but apart from settling her hands on your waist she doesn't take advantage of your terrible weakness to the fact she exists. "Before tomorrow."

You're thankful for her mercy. You don't—you don't really feel like being... _persuaded_ right now.

"What do you think she'll be like?" It slips out like a tear. Quiet and desperate. "Kartik said her body's fine but Waver and Reines wouldn't lie to me: not like this, not _over _this. Something's killing her but if it's not in her flesh it has to be something—something—"

Meltryllis pulls you into an embrace: the angle's awkward enough to hurt your back and your chin clips her shoulder with a _click _as she tugs you close but she's holding you like Atlas holds the sky and you don't care about anything else. Her voice in your ear sounds as soothing as the sea; the ebb and flow of soft syllables, the smooth rhythm of her breath cool against your skin.

"I think that you will be seeing her tomorrow for the first time in years," she says, "and that your imagination is preying on the fear and anticipation in your heart to conjure up a thousand terrors far more terrible than the truth. I do not know how to make it stop. I do not think I can. But I promise you this: I will be here when you sleep. I will be here when you wake. And I will be beside you when you see her."

Meltryllis hugs you harder for a moment and then shifts until she's holding you up by her shoulders. If her own are a little damp, she doesn't say anything. "Now, my love, it is time for you to thank me, for I will grant you the great honour of being delimbed at my hands."

You burble a laugh. "You don't have to say it so menacingly!"

She runs a nail right across the seam between metal and flesh on your right arm and smiles. "Liar."

You shiver and say nothing.

* * *

You wake without quite knowing why.

Is it the slight rumble of the air-conditioning starting another cycle? Is it the soreness of your jaw as your teeth clench from the nightmare you don't quite remember? Is it the soft emptiness of the bed by your side as Meltryllis collapses to liquid beneath the sheets and reforms in a swirling flood between you and the rest of the room and the lights snap on?

Or is it the whisper of shadow against shadow as a figure steps out of the furthest corner, chuckling softly as they ignore your wife's gunbarrel gaze to study you instead?


	7. The Falcon

"You had better appreciate how difficult it was for me to come here, girl," comes the imperious voice. A waterfall of silver hair down her back, bloody, gem-bright eyes sharp against a snow-white face, a well-ruffled dress and long, sleek stockings that cut off in a pattern like a crown above her knees—you've never seen her before, not once in your whole life, and yet you know her like the stars know heaven. "Those nuisances could potentially ruin everything while I'm gone."

Meltryllis relaxes, just a little: the impossible ocean churning beneath the stumps of her thighs no longer hisses with foam and the sea-salt snap of her mana softens to a cool breeze. You, of course, are far less reserved, for which you'll blame the hour and absolutely nothing else; jumping off the bed, you throw yourself at the woman, hugging her as tight as you can with only one arm. She's soft the way roses are—a pretty way to hide the thorns.

"Ishtar!" You lift your face to look at her—she's_ tall_ like this, almost as eerie as seeing her feet touch the ground—and smile. "What are you doing here?"

She doesn't hug you back at first. There's a strange tenseness to her shoulders, like a knight halfway to the deathblow and still wondering if they will strike or be struck. A curl of water, smooth and slow, slips across your bare ankle but moves no further.

But in the end Ishtar breathes out, low and heavy, and doesn't shove you off. Your smile widens until it's a grin, wry and wild—and then she rests a knife-thin finger under your jaw, right on the artery and tilts your head further back until your eyes meet. Hers are the red of racing hearts, of flushed cheeks and bitten lips and fresh scratches down a lover's arms. "I came for you, fool."

_BAHBABOBO—_

—you snap entropy through your veins and it swallows the shallow weakness of your flesh beneath the star-dark at the end of the world.

"Ishtar," you say mildly, hand dropping from the embroidered elegance of her dress to hang by your side as you take a single step back, "I'm married."

"Ah," she says softly, glancing between you and Meltryllis. You're not sure what she's seeing, only that she seems satisfied by it; her mouth curls into a sumptuous grin. "So you are. Such arrogance! To bind your heart to another without begging for the blessing of your goddess. You should kneel and grovel for my forgiveness."

"I probably should," you say, quite truthfully. To have strewn your dress with the flowers of Avalon and Kur, the glittering gems of Babylon and Bishamonten, and dance across the sky with only Manna beneath your feet—oh, the spectacle that could have been. You'd always wanted your wedding to be _big_. Loud and lively and laughing. "But I have a feeling that I wouldn't have been able to marry Meltryllis at all if somebody had discovered part of the wedding involved traditional ceremonies entreating Ishtar to bless the proceedings. There are those who take a… dim view, shall we say, of anything that could be mistaken for trying to summon a Servant happening in my vicinity."

Ishtar hums, sweet as plums. "They fear you."

"I've always wondered why," Meltryllis chimes in, flowing closer across the carpet to rest her arms around your neck. She's a cool press against your back, heavy with affection. "I mean, just look at her! The last time she tried to scare off a seagull from her fish and chips it mistook her for one of its babies and tried to feed her the chip in its beak."

You swat Meltryllis on the thigh and Ishtar laughs. It's pitched lower than you're used to and makes you think of biting into dark chocolate. "I don't think they fear me, not exactly. Not these days. They just get a little nervous at the thought they may have once had reason to."

"So they fear you _and_ they underestimate you." Ishtar sounds proud, her smile slow and sharp like it's being honed across a whetstone. It chases away the shadows that press in from the corners of the room and glitters off the bone-bright walls. "Well done, Ritsuka Coralli. You have learned well of war."

"I suppose it would be rude to refuse praise from a goddess," you say with a wry shrug, bouncing Meltryllis' arms a little as your shoulders move. You don't question how she suddenly knows your surname. "I've had my fill of war, though. These days I just want a perpetually lazy Sunday of a life."

"And yet, here you are." Ishtar studies you for a time and you study her in turn, watching the subtle flick of her blood-and-wine eyes and the easy way she stands so perfectly still, not even the expensive ruffles of her royal-purple dress shaking in the air that shifts and sways around her body. "There is something wrong with this place. You've felt it, haven't you?"

"Like a bone set wrong and itching in the rain," you say. Even the walls are strange in this place. They're too clean. They don't remember the scars. "Is that why you're _really_ here, Ishtar? To set things right?"

It does not for one moment cross your mind that Ishtar could be your enemy, that she could be the one who lured you here with treachery and slow, seeping poison. It's a thought so silly you don't even need to consider it to dismiss it out of hand. You trust her in ways that would be hard to explain to anyone who hasn't hung the fate of the world on the certainty that when you reach out a hand you will already find hers waiting.

"I will accept your apology in advance for suggesting I am a liar," Ishtar says, frowning, exchanging an unreadable glance with Meltryllis over your shoulder. "I am not in this world because of you, but I am in this _place_ because of you. You should understand better than most what it meant that I gave you my hammer, you silly girl: a promise that no matter the time, no matter her face, the goddess Ishtar would want to see you again."

She leans down until your eyes are level, blood to gold, and that single moment, that single gesture—you think Gilgamesh would have a heart attack in shock, to see the Queen of Heaven bowing her head before a mortal.

"I will not tell you why I am walking your Earth, Ritsuka Coralli. It is none of your concern. There are things that I must do and things I must protect. But I will tell you this." Ishtar steps forward and presses a slender finger into your chest. She could kill you like this, faster even than Meltryllis could react, a snap of divinity and a hole in your heart. That's what trust is. The difference between could and would. "Call. When you are cut, when you are bleeding, when you are cold and shaking and the sword is at your throat, _call_."

A pause, like the space between lightning and thunder.

"Call," Ishtar repeats, her eyes as sharp as stars, "and I will come. No matter where. No matter when. I will come. And my frightful cry will descend from the heavens to devour all who stand before you."

Did—Did she just _quote one of her own hymns _in order to aggrandise herself? What are you saying. It's Ishtar. Of _course_ she did.

(You mock because it's easier than admitting that you're blushing and hiding your face in Meltryllis' cheek; easier than admitting you're so genuinely touched Ishtar still cares for you that it feels like you might cry.

Meltryllis drops her arms to squeeze you around the waist and you know she gets it too).

"I'll—I'll keep that in mind," you choke out a little wetly. "Hopefully it won't come to that. Not because I don't want to see you again! I just don't want to be half-dead because of it."

"You will not be dead at all if I have anything to do with it," Ishtar and Meltryllis say at the same time before staring at each other and laughing: Meltryllis high, Ishtar low, the same sound an octave apart. Eventually, the latter continues. "I have little interest in repeating the Descent a third time. Though I suppose it would be better that you fell to my sister than any other of those grasping, greedy malcontents."

Less than a day back at Chaldea and you've already got goddesses quibbling about the fate of your immortal soul. Maybe this place isn't so different after all.

(Like all the lies you tell yourself, it's a lovely one).

You brush your hand over the delicate embroidery that decorates your gauzy sleeping pants, dozens on dozens of flowers carefully stitched in bright yellow thread. Oh, how soft; oh, how lovely. Like conversations under the Moon, like the fresh blush of friendship, like how the light gets in. You don't remember packing these. You're quite sure you know who did.

Meltryllis toys with your hair, ruddy strands coiling around her fingers—a testament to the perfection of her control that though those fingers are spun from a raging, coiling storm of water you can hear hissing against your ear, you are not even damp. You press yourself a little closer. And yawn, so hard your jaw cracks. Whoops.

"Though I am impressed at how quickly you have tired out my wife, Ishtar," Meltryllis says, just shy of teasing, "we should bring this affair to a close. The morning will be a—well, it will be long, I imagine."

"Such are the frailties of the human form," Ishtar says, her voice that strange edge between fondness and condescension, low and rich and tangling itself deep in your gut.

You roll your eyes but still step forward to hug her again—this time she accepts you without reservation, leaning down to press her lips to the crown of your head in something resembling a benediction. For a moment she just holds you, the sleeves of her dress soft against your waist, and you forget that this is not your room, that this is not your Chaldea, that this is not ten years past and lived and loved and lost, that you are not a fresh-faced child standing star-struck beneath the Sumerian sun.

Perhaps Ishtar forgets it too; her eyes are dark with something you cannot name when you drift away back into the circle of Meltryllis' arms, and the air around her tastes like the sweet melancholy of the moments before rain. But it's gone as quick as it appears and when you breathe again it's nothing but rich roses and the warmth of a clear sky.

"Be well, Ritsuka Coralli," she says, all pale, monochrome beauty given flush and fury by an empyrean soul. You would pity the fools who stand against her but you're pretty sure you know who they are and they can take care of themselves. The world is fond of rhymes. "Be well, and remember this: it is never wrong to love."

You blink and she's gone. The room seems darker for it. But that's fine. You can miss the Sun and still be fond of the shade.

"We should sleep, my love," Meltryllis says, kissing the shell of your ear. "The morning is not so far away."

"We should," you agree, your eyes pinching shut as you yawn again, jaw tight. "But that was—unexpected."

It's difficult to properly squeeze your wife's fingers when they're hissing tendrils of the sea spun into human shape, but you do your best and she squeezes back.

"Unexpected, but not surprising."

You tilt your head up and back to catch a glimpse of her face: the wry twitch of her lips, the haughty amusement of her stare. It's so strange to contrast her to Ishtar. Ishtar, who is beauty seen and lived and loved, who is the aching hammer of the heartbeat and the dry swallow of the throat; Meltryllis, who is breathless fear itching up the spine and low, pooling tension in the belly, who is the cold elegance of steel sharp against the night and the deep, transfixing rush of waves against the rocks. They are the two loveliest women you have ever seen and they look nothing alike at all.

There's a lesson in there somewhere. But you're too tired to wonder what it is.

"Not surprising?" you ask instead, the cool tiles of the plain white floor biting against your bare feet as you move over to the bed. Your left hand sinks a little into the mattress as you push yourself up. Meltryllis follows you, her body ebbing and flowing in a scintillating spray through the air until she reforms next to you, where you've lifted up what part of the thick covers weren't already thrown back. Her legs and fingers are empty spaces now, so you're the one to snap your fingers and shut off the lights as you settle back on the surprisingly plush pillows.

"I was not expecting Ishtar to be the first," Meltryllis says, turning over to watch you, the rolling tresses of her hair falling in front of her eyes. "A goddess is a rare thing even for _you_, my love. But this is Chaldea, and you were once Ritsuka Fujimaru. No—I was not surprised that a Servant came to visit you here, and I am sure she will be far from the last."

"Are you sure you're not putting me on too high a pedestal?" Your voice comes out rough, burred with sleep. "I'm not much of a Master these days, you know."

A laugh that burrows beneath your skin, warm with affection. "Were you ever?"

Fair enough, all things considered.

You curl into the sleek stretch of her waist and close your eyes.

Sleep comes easily, and dreams not at all.

* * *

The morning finds you sitting across from Gray in the cafeteria, munching on an apple-and-cinnamon muffin as she devours what you're pretty sure is her second eggs benedict of the day. It's a hot blast of flavour every time you breathe in, tickling your nose and making you want to sneeze—you've never been that fond of spices, but Gray seems to add them to _everything_. Sometimes you wonder if she's really English.

You nibble a bit more of your muffin, then plop it down on your ceramic plate, leaning back on the bench as Meltryllis reaches over absently to hold you up. "Did you get any strange visitors in the night, Gray?"

Gray chews for a little bit, then puts her knife and fork down with a frankly Reinesian level of elegance—they make not the slightest clink against the bright metal of the table. She glances between you and Meltryllis, her hood deep enough that you can't quite tell if she's raising an eyebrow. "Reines and I are nothing like the two of you, thank you very much."

"I—I don't know what you're insinuating here," you say, absolutely refusing to blush, "but that's not what I was talking about!"

"Ritsuka," Gray says with an astonishingly innocent smile, "how can you not know what I'm insinuating but also say what I'm insinuating is not what you were talking about?"

"_That's not the point here_," you stammer out so quickly you almost bite your tongue, glancing in mute helplessness at Meltryllis to come and save you from this cruel and unusual punishment. What did you ever do to Gray to make her betray you like this?! Besides calling her Lady Pendragon. Because that doesn't count. It was too good a chance to waste!

Meltryllis offers you a single, consoling pat on the head. "What my wife is trying to get around to saying is that Ishtar came to visit us last night and we were wondering if you experienced anything similar."

Gray blinks in surprise, green eyes wide. "No, not at all. I only slept for a couple of hours, but if anyone came into my room even Add didn't notice them."

"I thought so," Meltryllis says, idly rubbing a hand against the curve of your spine, slow and soothing. "It was an interesting visit. She wore a different body and she had a different soul. Still unmistakably Ishtar, just… smaller. More than a shadow but less than a ghost. I'm not sure if she was a Servant at all."

You hadn't noticed it in the heat of the moment, fresh with surprise and joy and a soft sort of melancholy, but Meltryllis is right. While Ishtar had commanded the room without thought or effort, well—you remember what it was like the first time you saw her sitting on the throne in her temple. Beauty bled from the cut of her jaw and war hammered itself from the iron bands of her stomach. You'd looked up and it had felt _right_. As if there could be no other shape to the world than this: her above, and you below.

You'd shaken it off, of course. But the memory of that presence remains and compared to it the Ishtar you met in the night was… not. She was terrible and lovely and the force of her attention had licked down your spine and straight into your gut—and that was all. No wonder Meltryllis had picked it up immediately. Another sign you're out of practice. You'll forgive yourself this one, though. You were understandably distracted.

"She wasn't a Servant," you agree, taking the chance to snatch another bite of your muffin. Mmm. Delicious. "I missed it at the time but—she wasn't. She was just Ishtar. No class, no container, and… well, she didn't even call _me _Master."

Maybe it's arrogant of you, to think something like that. And yet... _no matter the time, no matter her face_. Perhaps you have reason to think it. Certainly Meltryllis and Gray agree—they both nod as if that settles it.

"Did she say anything interesting?" Gray asks, before digging back into her breakfast. The terrible temptation of too-rich fat and hollandaise wafts from across the table and you ward it off with another sip of your bitter, nutty coffee. Your mug echoes off the table when you put it back down. "The timing is…"

Gray shrugs, an awkward bop of her surprisingly broad shoulders—she's not wearing her cloak, just a casual grey hoodie with a splash of Chinese characters you can't read on the front, so you can see where the thin fabric strains to contain the taut spring of her torso, the iron-hard flex of her arms in motion. She's still small, barely up to your nose when counting her hair-bun, but she's small the way a machete is, and for much the same purpose.

"It wasn't her," you say, because you know Gray had to ask. "She spoke mostly of… personal things. And promised that if my back was ever against the wall, she would come burning in rage and thunder to defend it."

"I think, perhaps, she was trying to warn us," Meltryllis adds, a thoughtful cast to her features, one hand tapping a rhythm you recognise from _somewhere _(probably one of her performances) on the table. "Both in the promise and in her parting words."

Gray tilts her head to the side, birdlike in her curiosity. "Oh?"

"_Be well, and remember this: it is never wrong to love_," you quote; lovely words from a lovely voice that you can't quite mimic, your own softer and always faintly tired, like a worn-down room stacked with old and forgotten toys. "I'm pretty sure it was just a blessing. Nothing complicated."

Even so, the words have settled somewhere deep inside you, somewhere intimate, in the hollows between your bones and skin where your blood lingers like moss upon a grave. You've always been quiet, introspective, all gangly thoughts and awkward silences. As a kid, it made you seem mature; as an adult, it makes you seem patient. Unflappable. But you've never really been that good at putting those thoughts to language, fitting them in the shapes and songs of sentences—and Ishtar has cut right to the core of you, the truth you have always lived by but never known how to say.

Maybe Ishtar thought you needed the reminder. After all, you're visiting Mash right once you've finished breakfast. You don't need it, though. It's not like that. It'll never be like that. But you appreciate the kindness all the same.

"Maybe so," Meltryllis says with a lazy shrug, taking a sip of her tea. "You would know better than I, my love."

You giggle, just a little. That'll be the day.

"What are you doing next, Ritsuka?" Gray asks.

You're silent for a moment, taking a chance to look around the cafeteria instead of answering. It's much the same as it ever was: large, with rows of rectangular tables and benches, the roof and and walls and floor the same off-white as the rest of Chaldea. But the room doesn't hiss with the electricity of a hundred heroes jostling each other for a chance to talk or argue or steal food off each other's plates. The only other people in here this late are a few technicians in their green shirts who occasionally poke a glance at the three of you but don't seem brave enough to strike up a conversation.

"Going to see Mash," you say eventually, Meltryllis' hand soothing between your shoulders. "Are you coming?"

Gray shakes her head. "I shouldn't."

"I don't mind," you say, "really."

"No," she says, a little quieter, "I'll get started on looking into why we triggered Chaldea's automatic defences and why nobody noticed they'd fired. My master always said that if you ever had to attack, you should always have as many angles as possible."

Honestly it sounds more like something Reines would say than Waver, but you'll allow it.

Meltryllis leans over to press a kiss against your cheek before she speaks, her lips gentle and faintly wet. "The sooner the better, then?"

You look mournfully at what remains of your muffin.

Alas.


End file.
